Answering Why: Action and Reaction Explanations in Word of Mouth

Word of mouth (WOM), where consumers share information about experiences with others, is an everyday occurrence that strongly influences consumers (Arndt 1967) and firms (Chevalier and Mayzlin 2006). However, prior work has overlooked a key component of WOM: its content. While prior work has focused on valence (Richins 1983), content is key to understanding the impact of WOM (Godes et al. 2005), as demonstrated in recent work (Schellekens et al. 2009; Moore 2012). The current paper focuses on when and why individuals use particular WOM content. We investigate explaining language as one important type of content; individuals often explain events and experiences, to reduce uncertainty and manage future utility (Gilbert, Wilson, and Centerbar 2003). Prior work shows that the act of explaining influences consumers’ evaluations of their experiences. Due to their primarily emotional nature, explaining dampens evaluations of hedonic experiences, but, due to their primarily cognitive nature, explaining polarizes evaluations of utilitarian experiences (Moore 2012). We extend this work by examining the role of two types of explanations—action and reaction explanations (Malle 2006)—in WOM. Action explanations outline why consumers chose experiences or behaved in certain ways (e.g., I bought the cookies for a friend). Reaction explanations outline why consumers felt the way a certain way about experiences (e.g., I liked the cookies because they were chewy). While prior work has identified actor/observer differences in using these types of explanations (Malle 2004), we focus on explanations in a WOM context.