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The Role of Attention in Shaping Consumer Preferences in News Media and Advertising
Viswanathan Saunak, Vaidyanathan
Viswanathan Saunak, Vaidyanathan
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2024-08
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Business Administration/Marketing
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http://dx.doi.org/10.34944/dspace/10590
Abstract
The aim of this dissertation is to study the role of attention in two important domains – news consumption and advertising. The World Economic Forum, in its Global Risks Report, has identified a “deteriorating global outlook” for the next decade. The top three contributors to this negative outlook are misinformation, climate change, and societal polarization. Specifically, the report predicts that as the technological landscape changes and polarization grows, “the truth will come under pressure” and “environmental risks could hit the point of no return.” (World Economic Forum, 2024). Therefore, the two most important imperatives facing the world today are combatting polarization through misinformation and promoting organizational social responsibility (by promoting organizations that work toward socially desirable outcomes like combatting climate change and ensuring social equity). This dissertation addresses both these issues through the lens of attention.Across 4 studies, this dissertation shows that while increased attention does help in spotting individual false claims, increasing consumers’ attention to news stories may not be a silver-bullet solution to combatting fake news narratives in longer-than-headline contexts. When people consume news stories, their impression of the story as a whole is an important determinant of how they perceive claims within that story and whether they are likely to share them. Importantly, the current work shows that greater attention might exacerbate the viral spread of false claims because people often rely on their heuristic judgments of the news stories in which they first encountered a claim to determine sharing intentions. This result underscores the importance of revisiting regulatory and organizational strategies to combat misinformation. The current dissertation outlines how biometrics can be used as a robust method to identify news stories that are likely to give rise to viral claims (fake or otherwise), thereby enabling organizations to direct their fact-checking resources better.
This dissertation also shows, across five studies, how brands and NPOs that are actively contributing to improving societal outcomes can better advertise their efforts. I study the role of attention in CSR (Corporate Social Responsibility) advertising. While normative reasoning suggests that providing consumers with more information about organizational efforts is better for improving consumer attitudes and behavior, we show that this is not always the case. Specifically, the current work explicates that while it is beneficial for brands to communicate their concrete resource contributions to a social cause in their CSR advertising, it is not always beneficial for NPOs to do so. The difference arises because when brands reveal a signal of resource commitment to the cause in a CSR ad, people notice this signal, and it makes people believe that the brand is more honest and sincere. On the other hand, when NPOs- often the ones working closest to the social causes on the ground - reveal their resource contributions to a cause in a CSR ad, people pay less attention to these signals in the ad. Consequently, they are less likely to infer any additional sincerity on the part of the NPO.
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