• Journal of Distribution Science
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• v.18 no.4
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• pp.79-85
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• 2020

Purpose: This study explores how cognitive impairment caused by social exclusion experience can be explained through cognitive narrowing and how it influences consumer's judgment and reasoning and results pseudodiagnosticity bias towards distribution brands. This study examines the characteristics of cognitive narrowing, which is one of the strategies for overcoming the negative emotions resulting from social exclusion, and how cognitive errors called pseudodiagnosticity bias occur due to cognitive narrowing in the evaluation of distribution brands. Research design, data and methodology: Present study was performed with 77 college students in Seoul. Participants were randomly assigned to the group who experienced social exclusion and the group who did not experience social exclusion. The analysis has been made of how the degree of bias of pseudodiagnosticity differs according to the experience of social exclusion by t-test. Results: The group who experienced social exclusion had a higher level of pseudodiagnosticity bias towards distribution brands than the group who did not experience social exclusion. Conclusions: This study confirmed what characteristics of cognitive narrowing, which is one of the strategies for overcoming the negative emotions resulting from social exclusion, and how cognitive errors called pseudodiagnosticity bias occur due to cognitive narrowing. Implications and future research directions were discussed and suggested.