Student Information

Sua Lee, Western UniversityFollow

Faculty

Social Sciences

Supervisor Name

Dr. Jamie Hyodo

Keywords

magical thinking, superstition, contagion, disgust

Description

The purpose of this literature review was to gain an understanding of magical thinking and contagion in the consumer behaviour context and to explore future research directions. To identify relevant literature, a comprehensive database search was conducted, using keywords: “magical thinking”, “superstition”, “contagion”, and “disgust”. A number of articles that have been published suggest that consumers view the product that is touched by others as being contaminated, which elicits feelings of disgust and eventually decreases their evaluations and intentions to purchase. The review also reveals that previous studies have not established how contagion responses work for second-hand products in an online setting, which leads to my hypotheses for future research.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the USRI program for giving me this opportunity. In addition, I would like to thank Dr. Jamie Hyodo for his support and assistance as my supervisor.

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 4.0 License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 4.0 License

Document Type

Poster

Share

COinS
 

Magical Thinking and Contagion: A Descriptive Review

The purpose of this literature review was to gain an understanding of magical thinking and contagion in the consumer behaviour context and to explore future research directions. To identify relevant literature, a comprehensive database search was conducted, using keywords: “magical thinking”, “superstition”, “contagion”, and “disgust”. A number of articles that have been published suggest that consumers view the product that is touched by others as being contaminated, which elicits feelings of disgust and eventually decreases their evaluations and intentions to purchase. The review also reveals that previous studies have not established how contagion responses work for second-hand products in an online setting, which leads to my hypotheses for future research.

 

To view the content in your browser, please download Adobe Reader or, alternately,
you may Download the file to your hard drive.

NOTE: The latest versions of Adobe Reader do not support viewing PDF files within Firefox on Mac OS and if you are using a modern (Intel) Mac, there is no official plugin for viewing PDF files within the browser window.