Comprehension of online consumer-generated product review: a construal level perspective

This study explores how consumers, who differ in their psychological distance toward the purchasing event (i.e., temporal distance) or toward product review writers (i.e., social distance), comprehend concrete or abstract reviews. Two experiments were conducted. The first experiment examined how a consumer’s perception of temporal distance, near future or distant future, would affect his/her comprehension of product reviews of varying abstractness. Results reveal that consumers of near temporal distance perceive concrete reviews to be more helpful. These consumers express a higher recall ability compared to counterparts of distant temporal distance. However, consumers of near temporal distance perceive abstract reviews to be less helpful and express a lower recall ability compared to those of distant temporal distance. The second experiment investigated how social distance, i.e., whether the review is written by someone who is perceived to be socially close to the reader would influence his/her comprehension of product reviews of varying abstractness. Results indicate that, with the provision of concrete reviews, consumers perceive non-significant difference of the review helpfulness under near and distant social distance and exhibit comparable recall ability. With the provision of abstract reviews, however, consumers of a near social distance recognize the reviews as helpful and recall the product better than did those of a distant social distance. This study presents a theoretically-driven and empiricallyvalidated proposition to improve the presentation of product reviews to aid consumer review comprehension.