Marjan Jalali

The role of information in bridging the attitude-behaviour gap in ethical consumption

Despite the seeming omnipresence of policy communications in our day to day lives (Weiss and Tschirhart 1994), their actual effectiveness at producing the intended changes in attitudes and/or behaviours is far from clear (Burgoon et al. 2002). Indeed, in many cases, such communications have been found to produce only small or no effects at all, and more surprising still, have been linked to attitudinal changes in the direction opposite to that intended and promoted (Burgoon et al. 2002). One way to understand such effects is reactance theory (Brehm 1966); i.e., policy communications often engender such resistance because they threaten individuals freedom? namely, to choose any particular position on an issue. Given the apparent frequency of these reactance effects in response to policy communications (e.g.: Bensley and Wu 1991; Grandpre et al. 2003), it would seem relevant to try to understand the conditions under which reactance is more or less likely to occur. Here, construal level is proposed as one possible moderator of reactance, such that when information is processed at high levels of construal it is less likely to produce reactance than when it is processed at low levels of construal.

Professor Donnel Briley is supervising this project.

Seán McNally

Determination of Interaction Effects Between Expectations and Post-Event Information on Memory of Items in a Service Encounter: Do expectations moderate the advertising misinformation effect?

This study looks at the interaction of post-event information, such as advertising, and expectations in a service encounter to better understand how advertising shapes the way consumers remember a service they have received.

Associate Professor Elizabeth Cowley is supervising this project.