With the advent of the era of personalized consumption, it is more and more common for personalized products to suffer from word-of-mouth polarization. Current research pays less attention to the impact of word-of-mouth polarization on consumer purchase decisions. In addition, there are few systematic theoretical results on the influence mechanism of review dispersion on consumer decision-making and the few relevant studies mainly explore from the perspective of product quality uncertainty brought by inconsistent word-of-mouth. Focusing on the conflicting and controversial features implied by word-of-mouth polarization, this paper introduces the concept of “conflict resolution style” in the field of organizational behavior into the research framework of consumer behavior, and connects the seemingly-unrelated concepts of conflict resolution style and product preference. The research tries to verify that consumer self-construal will affect consumer preference for polarizing products due to their different conflict resolution styles.

Four experiments were designed for this study. We measured consumers’ chronic self-construal and initiated consumers’ situational self-construal using different manipulative methods. The empirical test of theoretical hypotheses is conducted by means of variance analysis, simple effect analysis and bootstrapping method.

The results show that consumers with independent self-construal show greater preference for polarizing products than consumers with interdependent self-construal. The reason is that, independent self-construal consumers tend to adopt a confronting conflict resolution style, while interdependent self-construal consumers tend to adopt an avoiding conflict resolution style. The result will be different in the private consumption situation. As interdependent self-construal consumers no longer need to consider others’ evaluation in the context of private consumption, there is no significant difference in the preference for polarizing products between independent self-construal and interdependent self-construal consumers.

The contributions are as follows: First, previous studies mainly focus on the negative impact of word-of-mouth dispersion on consumer behavior caused by the uncertainty of product quality, while this paper focuses on the controversial and conflicting characteristics implied by word-of-mouth polarization and reveals that word-of-mouth polarization will also produce a normative effect, which provides a new perspective for exploring the influence mechanism of word-of-mouth dispersion on consumer behavior. Second, this paper incorporates the two concepts of conflict resolution style and product preference into a research framework, which expands the boundary of research on both concepts. Third, this paper incorporates the mediation mechanism of conflict resolution style into the framework, which enriches the research on the influence mechanism of self-construal on consumer behavior. The findings also provide great referential significance for enterprises to develop marketing strategies for polarizing products.