Ritual Affects Construal Level: The Roles of Emotion and Involvement

摘要

There has been abundant research focusing on psychological mechanism of how ritual affect consumers'behavior(e.g.,performing rituals can affect consumers'emotion and cognitive process).But will and how rituals activate the level of construal on the associated events or consumption? Our claim is that when the ritual can affect individuals'construal level through arousing positive emotion and evoking high-degree personal involvement.Under some circumstances,e.g.,remembering a text,taking a math exam,or playing chess,high level of personal involvement would evoke quite large amount of cognitive resource,which restrains arousal of positive emotion and even turns emotion negatively.On the contrary,when involvement causes little cognitive burden,e.g.,drinking a glass of lemonade,eating a chocolate bar,or praying before meals,rituals can lead to higher construal level by evoking positive emotion.