The effects of cognitive sources of emotions on consumer’s moral judgment and purchase intention of a counterfeit luxury brand

Abstract

This paper mainly investigates cognitive sources of mood congruency effect on moral judgments. A theoretical account of our argument is based on the affect Appraisal-Tendency Framework (ATF). According to the ATF, emotions of the same valence can have different effects on consumers’ judgment and choice. So far, literature on ATF has not paid much attention on the diverging effects of the same emotion. This paper argues that depending on the mood-inducing stimuli or the cognitive contents, the same emotion can generate different effects on judgment. Therefore, the main objective of this paper is to address the effects of different cognitive sources of the same emotion on judgments. This paper hereafter define the scope of the judgments in terms of the following three possible occasions which involves moral decision makings: (1) moral hypocrisy, (2) hypercrisy (reverse of hypocrisy), and (3) neither hypocrisy nor hypercrisy. I expected and empirically tested that divergent moral judgments were made depending on the cognitive sources of the same emotions. To test hypotheses, about 450 participants were recruited from the US for two quasi-experiments. Study 1 analyzed the effects of two negative emotions: anger and envy, while Study 2 examined two positive emo-tions: pride and gratitude. To measure moral judgments, one’s or other’s acceptability of a moral-dilemma scenarios and one’s purchase intention of a counterfeit luxury brand items were evaluated. For the analysis, independent samples t-test, and analysis of covariance (ANCOVA) were conducted. The results supported that depending on the cognitive sources, even the same emotion result in divergent moral judgments. The main implication of this paper concerns the expansion of the Appraisal-Tendency Framework with emphasis on the divergent effects of cognitive sources of the same emotion. The other implication concerns that this study engages moral constructs; such as hypocrisy and hypercrisy, to a consumption...