Descriptive or injunctive: How do restaurant customers react to the guidelines of COVID-19 prevention measures? The role of psychological reactance

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijhm.2021.102934Get rights and content

Highlights

  • This study confirmed that individuals perceive normative appeals of COVID-19 prevention measures differently.

  • Most hypotheses were tested by employing using PROCESS marco model 6 and 85.

  • The injunctive normative appeal has higher psychological reactance and lower attitude than descriptive.

  • There is a serial mediated effect of freedom threat and negative cognition through normative appeals and attitude.

  • Age has the partial moderated and moderated mediation effect of normative appeals on attitude through psychological reactance.

Abstract

In this study, we employed an experimental design to empirically test how restaurant customers react differently to normative appeals (descriptive vs. injunctive) relating to COVID-19 prevention measures through freedom threat and negative cognition. We conducted t-tests, serial mediation, moderation, and moderated serial mediation analysis to test the hypotheses using SPSS 23.0 and PROCESS macro v.3.5 (model 6 and model 85). Injunctive normative appeal causes an increase in freedom and a less favorable attitude than descriptive normative appeals. The findings also demonstrate the serial-mediated effect of freedom threat and negative cognition on attitude. Furthermore, the effectiveness of normative appeals depends on an individual’s age. This study contributes to the academic literature on hospitality by applying psychological reactance theory and testing the model within a restaurant context. It also discusses the implications of its findings for consumers and restaurant managers.

Keywords

COVID-19
Restaurant
Normative appeals
Psychological reactance
Attitude

Data availability

Data will be made available on request.

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