It's the little “stingsâ€: Racial microaggressions against Asian American customers in retail and their effects

Heejin An Lim and Hyunjoo Im

Journal of Retailing and Consumer Services, 2023, vol. 71, issue C

Abstract: Racial discrimination frequently occurs in the retail context. Yet, research has neglected to investigate the experiences and effects of racial microaggressions against Asian Americans in retail. To close this gap, the researchers opted for a mixed-method design combining one-on-one semi-structured interviews and online experiments. The findings in Study 1 show that Asian American customers face more racial microaggressions that are low in racial loading than are high. In Studies 2 and 3, the results indicate that participants in the high racial loading conditions feel higher degrees of anger and shame than those in the low racial loading conditions. Moreover, participants in the high racial loading conditions show lower repatronage intentions and higher word-of-mouth intentions than those in the low racial loading conditions. Also, anger has a stronger association with behavioral intentions than shame. This research adopts the attributional ambiguity theory to understand the psychological processes and effects of racial loading in microaggressions.

Keywords: Asian American; Racial microaggressions; Attributional ambiguity; Anger; Shame; Repatronage; Word-of-mouth (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0969698922002879
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:joreco:v:71:y:2023:i:c:s0969698922002879

DOI: 10.1016/j.jretconser.2022.103194

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Retailing and Consumer Services is currently edited by Harry Timmermans

More articles in Journal of Retailing and Consumer Services from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().