The Effect of Consumer-Activated Mind-Set and Product Involvement on the Compliance With Recommender System Advice

Abstract

Whereas the research gauging the effectiveness of e-commerce recommender systems (RS) has depended on their design factors, recent work proposes a key role for consumer’s psychological factors. Involvement should reduce the compliance with RS advice because a consumer highly involved with the product perceives high choice risk and assigns low value to the advice. However, a consumer’s activated mind-set captured by implicit theory (fixed vs. growth mind-set) should also shape compliance. It is hypothesized that the two factors interact to jointly mitigate advice taking. Specifically, consumers whose fixed mind-set is primed comply with the RS advice less often when involvement is high. This and other anticipated effects (i.e., consumer’s importance of social approval, positive affect, and need for cognition) on advice compliance are tested in an experiment on 251 Canadian adults. In the experiment, compliance occurred when the participant follows the RS advice, and product involvement was initially measured. The results show that priming a fixed mind-set, which orients shoppers toward a performance goal, motivates them to comply with the RS advice when involvement is low. Priming a growth mind-set, which orients shoppers toward a learning goal, nullifies such effect. Positive affect and the importance of social approval had no significant impact on advice taking. Therefore, the effect of involvement on RS effectiveness is contingent on the shopper’s accessible mind-set.