关键词: 排名列表, 评价极化效应, 项目感知差异, 属性可评估性, 空间隐喻

Abstract:

As a means of communication to help consumers quickly identify the advantages and disadvantages of brands or products, the ranking list has been paid more and more attention by merchants and consumers. However, most of the existing researches on the ranking effect focuses on comparing the influence mechanism of different ranking list items or positions on consumers, ignoring the influence of different display modes of the same list on consumer evaluation. For this purpose, based on the spatial metaphor theory, the paper studied different display modes (vertical or horizontal) of the same ranking list to explore their impacts on the difference in consumer evaluation of items ranking list.
This study intends to explore the above relationship and its internal mechanism through five experiments. Firstly, two online experiments (Experiment 1a [N = 200] and Experiment 1b [N = 332], scenario of mobile phone brand evaluation) were conducted to verify that the evaluation polarization effect existed in both the positive ranking list and the negative ranking list. Secondly, Experiment 2 (N = 228) was a laboratory experiment to expand the partial ranking list to the whole item ranking list form (gift evaluation scenario). The results show that in the full-ranking list form, consumers’ evaluation difference of items in the vertical ranking list is significantly higher than that in the horizontal ranking list, with the increase of the number of items in the ranking list, evaluation difference becomes more obvious.
Experiment 3 (N = 187) adopted common school ranking scenarios to verify the mediating role of item perception difference in the above relationship, the higher evaluation polarization effect of the vertical ranking list than the horizontal ranking list is due to Consumers have greater perceived item differences for items in vertical ranking lists. Finally, Experiment 4 (N = 279) applied the form of brand ranking list to verify the main effect, meanwhile, the moderating effect of attribute evaluability was also examined. When the evaluability of attributes is low, the evaluation polarization effect of different lists will appear. On the contrary, when the item attribute of the ranking list is highly evaluable, this polarization effect of evaluation disappeared.
This study expands the relevant theories of ranking effect and spatial metaphor, and provides practical guidance for merchants to flexibly use ranking lists to effectively communicate with consumers. In particular, the contributions of the study include the following: (1) we explore the influence of the change of ranking item spatial position on consumer item evaluation, and thus expand the theoretical framework of ranking effect research; (2) we effectively combine spatial and numerical elements in the context of the ranking list, further expend the theory of numerical cognitive bias under the same dimension of number representation forms; (3) we expand the theoretical application scenarios of “spatial metaphor”. In this study, the two dimensions of spatial metaphor theory (location metaphor + distance metaphor) were employed to systematically illustrate the internal mechanism of the influence of spatial representation of ranking list on evaluating polarization effect. Our study effectively brings the two sub-dimensions of spatial metaphor theory into the overall consideration of the same theoretical framework; (4) we expand the precursor psychological factors of evaluation polarization from a cognitive perspective. The emergence of the study increases and expands the expression forms and application scenarios of evaluating polarization effect, deeply exploring the psychological cognitive process of evaluating polarization effect in theoretical scenarios.

Key words: ranking list, evaluation polarization effect, item perceived variance, attribute evaluability, spatial metaphor