Not All Desires Are Created Equal: Exploring a Dual -Motivation Account of Consumer Desire
In consumer behavior, desire plays a central role, charging attitudes, values, norms, and other antecedent variables with the motivational energy needed to ignite the consumer's behavioral engine and drive it toward action (Bagozzi 2006). Desire should be a critical variable of inquiry for understanding consumer motivation, decision making, and behavior. Unfortunately, it is commonly equated with emotion, attitudes, and/or temptations rather than being discussed as a unique motivational state and an active decision state translating reasons for acting into intentions to act. Furthermore, the majority of existing research assumes there is only one dimension of desire, assuming that only one dimension that completely captures the motivational influence of this construct. In the philosophy of action literature, however, Davis (1984) discusses two sources of desire motivation: appetitive and volitive. These represent the different sources of the motivational intensity of the desire. Appetitive motivation is drawn from the perceived intrinsic pleasure or pain of the desire, whereas volitive motivation is drawn extrinsically from one's reason(s) for the desire. Both of these aspects, the appetitive and volitive are in some way present in any given desire, although at different levels of desire intensity. To provide a deeper understanding of desire, in this dissertation I draw from the literature in psychology and philosophy to develop a distinct conceptualization of desire as a psychological state composed of appetitive and volitive motivation. The implications of this dual-motivation account of desire with respect to behavior and self-regulation are developed conceptually and tested empirically via three studies. The first study establishes the validity of the dual-motivation account via discriminant and convergent validity analyses. The second study provides a replication of the first study's findings, in addition to testing the role of desire's dual-motivation structure on consumer perceptions of their desire states and on subsequent behavior. Study three focuses on the crucial interplay of desire and self-regulation, in particular: regulatory focus. Finally, the implications of these findings and directions for future research are discussed.
University of Illinois - Urbana-Champaign
Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign