Rohini Ahluwalia

Who they are

Ahluwalia is the Curtis L. Carlson Trust Professor of Marketing and Marketing Department Chair at the Carlson School of Management at the University of Minnesota. Her faculty profile lists a PhD in marketing from Ohio State University, an MBA from Clarion University of Pennsylvania and an honours BA in economics from the University of Pune.

The research areas on the profile are branding and advertising, persuasion, consumer decision making, consumer wellbeing, negative information in the marketplace and brand extensions. The fifth of those is the one that bears on this publication. This page covers her 2002 paper and does not attempt a survey of the rest of her work.

Key papers

The paper that matters here is Ahluwalia (2002), published in the Journal of Consumer Research, volume 29, issue 2, pages 270 to 279. Its title asks a question, and the abstract frames it. The negativity effect, which the abstract defines as giving more weight to negative information than to equally extreme positive information when forming overall evaluations, is widely accepted and well documented. The abstract goes on to say that its robustness in consumer environments may be overstated.

The reasoning given in the abstract is about the gap between laboratory and marketplace. Earlier studies mostly asked people to judge unknown or hypothetical targets, and the aim of the judge was usually to form an accurate impression. Consumers in the marketplace often know the brands they are judging, and they may process information about those brands with other goals in mind, such as impression management and defence motivation. The paper reports two experiments designed to identify when the negativity effect is likely to appear and when it is less likely to.

The abstract as read for this page does not report what the two experiments found. It names the question and the conditions under study and stops there. This page therefore reports the paper's concern and design, and does not report its results.

Key ideas

The first idea is that a well-documented laboratory effect needs to be tested in the setting where it is claimed to matter. A result obtained with unfamiliar or invented targets and an accuracy goal may not carry over to shoppers who have prior views of brands and goals other than accuracy.

The second is that the goal of the person judging may change the weight they give to negative information. The abstract names impression management and defence motivation as examples of goals that consumers may have. This page does not report how the paper finds those goals to affect the result.

The third is the practical consequence for anyone relying on the saying that one bad review outweighs several good ones. The article "Why Does One Bad Review Hurt So Much" uses Ahluwalia's concern as a boundary on that saying. Negativity bias is well documented as a broad pattern, and one-star reviews moved book sales further than five-star reviews in the 2006 study by Judith Chevalier and Dina Mayzlin. Ahluwalia's paper is the reason the article treats those findings as a direction and not a rule for every buyer. Familiarity with the brand is the variable that both she and Paul Herr, in a 1991 paper on word of mouth, point to as changing the picture.

The article's rule of thumb that the likeliest place for a single bad review to carry its full weight is a product or seller the buyer does not yet know is the article's own inference from these papers. It is not a finding that Ahluwalia reports.

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