My world vs. the world–an emotion regulation perspective of psychological distance and corporate social responsibility message credibility

This paper applies the emotion regulation framework to examine how scope of attention and vividness shape consumer response to psychologically proximal and distant corporate social responsibility (CSR) messages. A scenario-based field experiment was conducted among a panel of 307 consumers, who were randomly assigned to psychologically distant or proximal CSR message. The results show that for psychologically proximal stimuli, local scope of attention (vs. global) leads to more positive emotions. However, this relationship does not hold for psychologically distant stimuli. In the case of psychologically distant stimuli, vividness of the message impacts perceived emotions. Additionally, nature of evidence (statistics vs. anecdotal/identifiable victim stories) does not impact perceived emotions when controlled for vividness. Lastly, perceived emotions influence credibility of the message.