Abstract:

The proliferation of AI-driven self-tracking technologies has empowered consumers to quantify their internal states, including mood, through digital feedback. However, an emotional tension emerges when AI-self-tracked emotion contradicts with user's actual feeling. This developmental paper investigates how self-tracking users respond to such incongruences, specifically focusing on subsequent (un)healthy food consumption decisions. Drawing upon (Festinger, 1957; Gardner, 1985; Garg et al., 2007) Emotional Dissonance Theory, the study proposes that negative incongruent feedback (e.g., the app reporting unhappiness when a user feels happy) triggers a state of psychological incongruence that consumers resolve through compensatory, impulsive or congruent food choices. Employing a 2 (actual emotional state: positive vs negative) x 2 (AI-driven self-tracking emotional state: positive vs negative) experimental design, this research aims to reveal the how emotion dissonance from with different valence affect individual consumption of (un)healthy food. Preliminary expectations suggest that negative incongruence could lead to the increased consumption of unhealthy foods as a means of dissonance reduction, whereas unhappy-happy incongruence may nudge users toward utilitarian choices through self-perception mechanisms. This research adds to the body of AI-related self-tracking technologies literature by extending emotion dissonance theory into the digital feedback domain and providing practical insights for appealing healthy food consumption from the emotional perspective.

Please choose your submission type: Developmental Paper

Primary Track: Marketing and Retail

Keywords: Consumer behaviour and psychology;Digital and social;Ethics and marketing;Marketing communications;Services marketing

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Dr. Wesley Yuen