• Science of Emotion and Sensibility
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• v.20 no.3
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• pp.49-60
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• 2017

Previous research found that merely touching an object can create psychological ownership and the endowment effect. It was also found that just imagining touching an object without actually touching the object can make the same effect on psychological ownership. Prior research on haptic imagery examined the effect of haptic imagery induced by direct instruction of imaging on psychological ownership. We investigate a new method which can induce the haptic imagery in a more natural way than direct instruction of imaging. We manipulated imagery conditions such as visual-haptic congruence multimodal cue, visual-haptic incongruent multimodal cue, direct instruction condition and control condition, and examined the effects on imagery vividness, feeling of physical control, perceived ownership, and purchase intention. We conducted the experiment on 140 undergraduate students and our results showed that visual-haptic congruence multimodal cue condition is more effective than direct instruction of haptic imagery while visual-haptic incongruence multimodal cue condition is not effective. Our study extends prior haptic imagery research by making important marketing implications for online retailing.