Contagion and Product Physicality: A Study of Consumer Response to Recycled-content Products.

The purchase of recycled-content products poses dilemmas for consumers. Consumers may want to preserve the environment, but simultaneously can be concerned about potential contamination resulting from prior use. We focus on understanding how prior history of recycled-content products might affect consumer perceptions and consumption of recycled goods. Specifically, we attempt to answer the following questions about consumer perceptions of recycled content products using contagion theory. To what extent do consumers devalue certain recycled-content products, but appreciate others? To what extent do consumers perceive an essence transfer from old materials to new products—that is, would a recycled-content product inherit some internal characteristics or properties from its original materials? What are the product factors that amplify or dampen a perceived essence transfer in a current consumption context? Prior research has suggested the importance of physical interactions in activating contagion (e.g., Newman, Diesendruck, and Bloom 2011). However, most scholars have studied physical contact as a dichotomous variable and assumed that contagion is dose insensitive to contact (Rozin and Nemeroff 2002). By focusing on how consumers infer the amount of physical contact from product physicality and functions, we explore the relationship between consumers anticipated physical contact and the prevailing contagion on recycled-content products. We argue that consumers should perceive greater contagion from recycled materials that have more physical contact with past users than from materials that have minimal physical contact with past users. Also, we extend this discussion to the way in which the implied physicality of recycled-content products informs consumers of the magnitude of contagion. We suggest that consumers infer different degrees of physical contact from products with different forms. For example, consumers may perceive greater physical contact with a pair of gloves that cover the entire hand than a pair of potholders which touches only the palm of the hand. We suggest that consumers should be more attentive to contagion cues when the use of a product suggests having more (vs. less) physical contact.