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Although prior research has not directly addressed this question, findings indicate that people tend to conform to others’ opinions in social situations. For example, if a person is in the company of someone who likes a movie, he or she also tends to report liking the movie. Likewise, if the person is in the presence of others who dislike an entrée at a restaurant, he or she will tend to report disliking this entrée as well. Extrapolating from these findings, it would be expected that exposure to others’ positive opinions about shared hedonic experiences would increase enjoyment of them and that exposure to others’ negative opinions about shared experiences would reduce enjoyment of them.

The authors propose an alternative view, suggesting that people’s enjoyment of shared experiences is affected by the extent of agreement between their opinions and those of others rather than by the extent of positivity of others’ opinions. A simple example illustrates this point. Imagine that a person is attending a ballet with a friend and that the person finds the performance to be of substandard quality. Imagine further that just as he or she turns to the friend to express a negative opinion about the ballet, the friend exclaims, “This is fantastic, isn’t it?” While the friend’s more positive opinion of the ballet may improve the person’s judgment of the performance—as a result of informational and normative influence—the incongruence between the friend’s opinion and the person’s opinion may reduce the enjoyment the person derives from watching the ballet with him. Now imagine, instead, that the friend says, “Isn’t this just terrible?” Although the person’s judgment of the ballet may remain negative (or become even more so) as a result of exposure to the friend’s opinion, the nature of the agreement may increase the person’s ultimate enjoyment of the shared experience.

This example illustrates that when it comes to enjoyment of shared experiences (rather than evaluation of shared stimuli), what matters more than the extent of positivity of others’ opinions is the extent of agreement between a person’s own opinions and those of others. The authors provide a theoretical basis for why the aforementioned extent of agreement has such a large impact on enjoyment of shared experiences. Briefly, the authors propose and find that congruence in self–other opinions is taken as an indication that a person has developed or nurtured a bond between him- or herself and the other, and the creation/maintenance of this bond is a source of positive feelings. The authors also propose and find that congruence in self–other opinions evokes good feelings because the congruence in opinions is taken as a sign that a person is correctly calibrated, that is, that his or her worldviews are accurate and veridical.

The findings suggest relatively straightforward ways that marketers may make their experiential offerings more appealing. Specifically, they suggest that promoting interactions among participants whose reactions to the experience are similar will increase the enjoyment of the experience and thus encourage them to repeat it. Conversely, allowing people with dissimilar reactions to mingle will likely have detrimental effects on repeat purchase. These implications generalize both to experiences that are pleasant (e.g., shopping, eating out) and to those that are unpleasant (e.g., physical training workshops, alcoholics anonymous meetings).

Biography
Rajagopal Raghunathan earned his PhD from the Stern School of Business at New York University and is currently employed as Assistant Professor of Marketing in the McCombs School of Business at the University of Texas at Austin. His work juxtaposes theories from psychology, behavioral sciences, decision theory, and marketing to document and explain interrelationships between affect and consumption behavior. Raj’s work has been published in top marketing and psychology journals, such as Journal of Marketing, Journal of Consumer Research, Motivation and Emotion, Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, and Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

Kim Corfman is Vice Dean for MBA Programs and Associate Professor of Marketing at New York University’s Stern School of Business. She has also served as Associate Dean for Instructional Support, directing the activities of Stern’s Center for Innovation in Teaching and Learning, Academic Director of the Langone Part-Time MBA Program, and coordinator of the doctoral program in marketing. Kim’s research interests include group decision making and judgment, social influence, and affect. Current projects examine the influence of affect on fairness perceptions, the management of guilt in consumer purchasing, the relationship between social influence and enjoyment, and how negative affect influences consumer choice. Her work has been published in such journals as Journal of Consumer Research, Journal of Marketing Research, Psychological Bulletin, Journal of Retailing, Marketing Letters, and Multivariate Behavioral Research. Kim received an BA in Romance Languages from Princeton University and an MBA and a PhD in Marketing from Columbia University.

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