Guest Speaker:
Mary Frances LUCE
Associate Professor of Marketing, The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania
Topic:
Coping with Conflict and Information in Emotion-Laden Domains
Chairperson:
Seshan Ramaswami
Associate Professor of Marketing, School of Business, Singapore Management University
Venue:
Eu Tong Sen Building, Level 1, Seminar Room 1
Singapore Management University
469 Bukit Timah Road, Singapore 259756
Date:
Wednesday, 28 January 2004, at 4.00pm
Reservation:
This seminar is free. Places are limited. Please confirm your attendance by Tuesday, 27 January 2004, 12 noon with Ms. Priscilla Cheng at priscillacheng@smu.edu.sg (telephone: 6822-0383) or Ms. Lim Lih Yeng at lylim@smu.edu.sg (telephone: 6822-0197).
About the Seminar:
This talk will review several research projects addressing how decision makers cope with information. Ongoing work addresses whether decisions, and therefore choice-related information, are framed as opportunities or threats. This framing might in turn influence decision processing. For instance, given a threat frame, additional alternatives might be experienced as increasing (undesired) decision conflict. Conversely, given an opportunity frame, additional alternatives might be experienced as increasing (desired) variety.
In work with Barbara Kahn, I propose that one important factor influencing the reaction to choice situations and information is the overall emotional content of the decision. We test our hypotheses within the domain of health (e.g., cancer) screening. The substantial amount of media attention devoted to cancer and other screening tests are likely to encourage initial screening. However, there is reason to believe that regular adherence to testing guidelines is relatively rare, even after consumers have been persuaded to initially adopt testing. For instance, in one study, 37% of women surveyed who had one prior mammogram decided not to get a second one (Jepson and Rimer 1993). We hypothesize that reactions to initial test information itself is likely to influence this regular testing over time.
In the context of mammography, we address women’s intentions to continue to get routine, regular screening, even after an initial or early testing experience indicates that the disease is not present. We consider the effects of prior results on testing intentions and we investigate whether these effects are moderated by information provided in the context of initial test results. We test our hypotheses experiments conducted on women in their hospital gowns waiting to get their mammogram in a University hospital waiting room. Although we focus on the mammography context, we believe our results are likely to generalize to any stressful information-seeking situation, where screening must be done on a regular basis without the prior presence of symptoms as a motivator. Thus, in this work, we are interested in the process by which false alarms influence factors related to the perceived value of test information – ultimately influencing compliance with testing.
