A Negation Bias in Word of Mouth: How Negations Reveal and Maintain Expectancies about Brands and Products

Consumers like to talk about their product experiences with others. This word of mouth (WOM) can have a strong impact on product evaluations and sales (e.g., Chevalier & Mayzlin 2006), both practitioners and academics have great interest in understanding its ef fects and underlying mechanisms. Although research on WOM has a long history, dating back to the seminal work of Katz and Lazarsfeld (1955), academics have only recently begun to examine language use (Moore 2012; Schellekens, Verlegh & Smidts, 2010). Findings suggest that consumers implicitly reveal much information “in between the lines” of their WOM messages. Such formulation differences may for instance reveal speakers’ a priori brand expectations when they describe a product experience. Of particular interest is the use of negations. The Negation Bias (Beukeboom, Finkenauer & Wigboldus, 2010) demonstrates that negations usage (e.g., not stupid, rather than smart) is more pronounced when (stereotypic) expectancies are violated, compared to when expectancies are confirmed. For instance, garbage men performing poorly on IQ-tests is stereotypically expected and likely described as “stupid”, for professors this would be unexpected and described as “not smart”. Importantly, negations lead message recipients to infer that the described experience was an exception, caused by situational circumstances (Beukeboom et al., 2010).