Journal Article On Inducing Compliance With Requests Get access Peter H. Reingen Peter H. Reingen Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic PubMed Google Scholar Journal of Consumer Research, Volume 5, Issue 2, September 1978, Pages 96–102, https://doi.org/10.1086/208720 Published: 01 September 1978 Article history Received: 01 June 1977 Revision received: 01 March 1978 Published: 01 September 1978

A sociocognitive perspective is developed to further the understanding of the relation between cognitive and social processes. The approach combines social network analysis with a cognitive network perspective to enable the researcher to study how social structure influences cognitive structure and how shared cognitive structure influences choice. This perspective is applied to how a group (with several subgroups) makes a consumer decision with consequences for the entire group. The results show that social structure influences cognitive structure, that shared knowledge is related to choice, and that the sociocognitive perspective provides new insights to prior literature on group decision making and the relation between group membership and brand choice.

This article presents a network analysis of word-of-mouth referral behavior in a natural environment. The relational properties of tie strength and homophily were employed to examine referral behavior at micro and macro levels of inquiry. The study demonstrates different roles played by weak and strong social ties. At the macro level, weak ties displayed an important bridging function, allowing information to travel from one distinct subgroup of referral actors to another subgroup in the broader social system. At the micro level, strong and homophilous ties were more likely to be activated for the flow of referral information. Strong ties were also perceived as more influential than weak ties, and they were more likely to be utilized as sources of information for related goods. O ne of the most widely accepted notions in con-sumer behavior is that word-of-mouth commu-nication (hereafter WOM) plays an important role in shaping consumers ' attitudes and behaviors. In an early study, Whyte (1954) investigated the diffusion of air

This article explores the relation of culture to consumption by investigating individual, social, and cultural sources of variation in the sharing of causal reasoning about behavior in two microcultures. The results suggest (1) the importance of intracultural variation in the study of culture, (2) differences between experts and novices as a robust source of this variation, (3) novel insights into the relationship between expertise and sociocultural phenomena, and (4) the potential for investigating attitude structure, categorization, and attribution as products of causal reasoning originating from cultural belief systems. The study also demonstrates the synergy created by diverse research methods.

Previous studies dealing with the notion of brand congruence suffer from questionable methods of group determination, suspect demonstrations of brand congruence effects, and inadequate attention paid to types of social relation. To overcome these shortcomings, the present study uses graph-theoretic social network techniques to examine interpersonal relationships and brand choice behavior in natural environments. The brand choices of individuals in a social relationship were compared to those of unrelated individuals across various products, types of social relation, and types of basic sociological structure (dyad, clique, and 2-plex). While significant brand congruence effects were obtained, they were clustered in a few products mediated by types of social relation. Conspicuousness of the product, as traditionally defined, was found to be insufficient to account for these findings.