Information Matching: How Regulatory Focus Affects Information Preference and Information Choice.

Xiaomei Wang,Jia Wang

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2021.618537

Abstract

Individuals often prefer information that matches their needs. In this study, we aimed to explore the relationship between regulatory focus and information preference. Specifically, we investigated the effects of promotion-focused information and prevention-focused information on explicit and implicit information preferences and choice behavior, and examined the mediating roles of information preference. In Experiment 1, we found that prevention-focused individuals were more likely to choose functional information, whereas promotion-focused people were more likely to choose hedonic information. However, there was no significant relationship between regulatory focus and explicit preference and no mediating effect of explicit information preference. In Experiment 2, we found that promotion-focused individuals had a greater implicit preference for hedonic information than did prevention-focused individuals. Implicit information preference mediated the influence of regulatory focus on information choice. The findings of this study may help us understand the psychological mechanism underlying information preference and have important implications for information dissemination.

Highlights

In the field of consumer behavior studies, products are generally divided into hedonic and functional ones
Information Choice Behavior and Explicit Preference According to the results of a t-test, there was a statistically significant difference in information choice behavior between
Using the bootstrap version of the Sobel test, we found the full regression model accounted for more than 65% of the variance in information choice, p < 0.01; and there was a significant, indirect effect of regulatory focus on information choice through implicit information preference, ab = 0.11, bias corrected 90% CI (0.003, 0.230), 5,000 resamples

Summary

Introduction

In the field of consumer behavior studies, products are generally divided into hedonic and functional ones. People usually focus on these products’ experiential aspects, mainly because they are manufactured to generate feelings of happiness, excitement, and stimulation. Functional information refers to instrumental and practical types of information, whereas hedonic information encompasses aesthetic and experiential types of information (Chitturi et al, 2007). Due to their limited processing capacity, human beings cannot process all the information they have access to; they choose the information that they want to be processed. How do motivational orientations influence information choice? numerous studies have documented regulatory focus and information processing of individuals (Roy and Ng, 2012; Burtscher and Meyer, 2014; Roy and Phau, 2014), there is limited research into the various effects of regulatory focus on information behavior of individuals at the explicit and implicit levels

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Results

Conclusion