The effect of social identity on consumers' processing of online hotel reviews

초록

Today’s consumers consult online product reviews before making purchase decisions, yet not every review is of equal importance. It indicates that the effect of online review is more complicated on the consumer decision making. Therefore, it is important to understand how consumers selectively process the reviews. The theoretical underpinning of this research is social identity theory because social identity is likely to become an influential attribute in the online consumer behavior. Grounded in social identity theory, the current study examines the relationships among consumers’ social identity salience, perceived credibility of identity-based reviews, and change of consumers’ attitude towards the hotel. It is hypothesized that consumers with salient social identity will perceive in-group reviews to be more persuasive than out-group reviews. Another theoretical foundation is information processing theory. Experimental design was employed as the research design. The number of research participants was 240. A total of 240 subjects were recruited from working professionals and randomly assigned to one of six treatment groups, with forty subjects in each treatment group. For each of the treatment groups, mock web-sites, similar in style to mundane online hotel review websites, were presented to the subjects. This study adopted Statical Package in Social Science (SPSS) 18.0 version for the data analysis. For the data analysis, this research adopted multi-variate data analysis technique (e.g., ANOVA, ANCOVA, and MANOVA). As a result, in-group reviews caused more attitude change within consumers than out-group reviews, especially when reviews were negative. Given the results, this study contributes to the literature by validating the accountability of social identity theory in the area of hotel reviews.

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