Cognitive Style and Consumers' Ethnocentrism

Abstract

The greater availability to consumers of foreign goods since the recent globalization of business has increased the need for measures to assess consumers' attitudes and preferences for domestic and foreign products. Consumers' ethnocentrism has been proposed as a construct that may partially explain why some consumers evaluate domestic products more favorably than foreign ones. The CETSCALE, developed to measure the ethnocentrism construct, has been shown to be valid and reliable; however, its developers pointed out a need to assess whether consumers' ethnocentric tendencies operate uniformly across all consumers or whether certain population segments indicate greater ethnocentric tendencies than others. The present study of whether ethnocentrism varied across cognitive styles suggests cognitive style affected 162 consumers' tendency toward ethnocentrism.