People who listened to their parents argue throughout their childhood are often so traumatised as adults that they avoid products with mixed online reviews, according to a psychological examination of the long-term effects of interparental conflict (IPC).
Adults who experienced IPC as children appear to dodge disagreements even in their online shopping behaviour, says Mengmeng Liu at Hong Kong Metropolitan University. They do so by opting for products with consistent ratings over those with a mix of good and bad reviews – meaning they would tend to choose a product with dozens of 3-star reviews over an alternative that received both glowing and terrible reviews to give a 3-star average.
“Review [differences] can be perceived as interpersonal disagreement that turns off those consumers who are more sensitive to conflict… due to previous unpleasant experiences in their lifetimes,” suggests Liu.
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All families experience forms of disagreement. But IPC is associated with arguments that never resolve, or those involving physical or verbal aggression, personal insults or expressions of anger and hostility, says Liu.
Previous research has shown that people growing up in homes with high IPC levels tend to develop anxiety, depression and feelings of shame even into adulthood, says Liu. In general, they have difficulty dealing with conflict between people and they usually avoid it altogether.
Curious about how IPC would affect people’s interpretations of product reviews, Liu and her colleagues carried out a series of five studies in which 1113 volunteers were asked to choose between a selection of hotel rooms, of physicians or of chocolate truffles after reading descriptions of the options and various customer or patient reviews. All the options had an average rating of 3 out of 5 stars, she says. But half of those averages resulted from consistent 3-star reviews, whereas the rest were calculated from an equal mix of 1-star and 5-star reviews.
The participants included 433 men and 680 women, most of whom were undergraduate students in Hong Kong or middle-aged people in the US recruited . The researchers didn’t collect data about each participant’s race. They assessed participants’ general attitudes towards interpersonal conflict as well as the degree of parental arguing they had witnessed as children based on a .
The researchers found that people who had experienced high levels of IPC as children were significantly less appreciative of goods and services that had a wide range of ratings, and they were less likely to choose them, says Liu.
For example, people with high levels of IPC found hotels with mixed reviews about 10 per cent less appealing than those with consistently average reviews, whereas people with low levels of IPC actually found hotels with mixed reviews about 1 per cent more favourable than those with consistently average reviews.
The participants with high levels of IPC also avoided a physical product – the chocolate truffle – that had received mixed reviews. The results were entirely independent of the participants’ socioeconomic background.
In addition, adults who had experienced IPC were more likely to accept a product with mixed reviews when the scientists encouraged them to consider the advantages of differences of opinion by asking them to brainstorm about how debating benefits society in general.
This reinforces the idea that the participants were indeed affected by their negative childhood experiences with conflict, according to Liu. In essence, she argues that when the participants “corrected” their thought processes by seeing disagreements as positive rather than negative, they then tended to be more open-minded about products with mixed reviews.
“We were somewhat surprised that destructive interparental conflict could have such long-term effects on how we respond to interpersonal conflict in such a subtle form as dispersed online reviews,” she says.
The study represents “a first attempt to answer whether having quarrelling parents may affect people’s decisions later in life when they are adults”, says Liu. “We find that it does.”
International Journal of Research in Marketing
