Where does animosity collide?

In marketing, animosity is a buyer's antipathy toward a particular foreign country, rooted in past or ongoing military, political, or economic grievance, that lowers their willingness to buy that country's products even when they judge the products to be good. Klein, Ettenson, and Morris introduced the idea in their 1998 study The animosity model of foreign product purchase, showing that Chinese consumers' resentment of Japan reduced their purchases of Japanese goods independently of how they rated product quality. The referent here is a targeted, country-specific attitude that acts on one nation's goods, not a general suspicion of all things foreign, not a broad hostility toward an outgroup, and not a state's posture toward a rival state.[1]

Unit

One consumer's antipathy toward one named foreign country

Recovery means

May ease as the underlying grievance fades or relations improve, but can persist across generations

Measured by

Captured by animosity scales rating war and economic grievance toward a country, then linked to stated willingness to buy its products

In social psychology, animosity names the hostile side of intergroup attitudes: the negative feeling, distrust, or contempt one social group holds toward another. Brewer's 1999 article The psychology of prejudice: Ingroup love or outgroup hate? argued that liking for one's own group and hostility toward outgroups are distinct, and that favouring the ingroup does not by itself produce hatred of others. The referent is a general disposition toward an outgroup defined by category, such as an ethnic, religious, or national group, and it is not tied to any product, purchase decision, or specific nation the way the marketing meaning is, nor is it the calculated posture of one state toward another.[2]

Unit

A group's or member's hostile stance toward an outgroup

Recovery means

Can decline through contact, shared goals, or recategorisation, but may harden under threat

Measured by

Assessed by attitude, feeling-thermometer, and social-distance measures comparing evaluations of ingroups and outgroups

In the study of international politics, animosity between states is treated as rivalry: a persistent relationship in which two governments regard each other as competitors and threats, expecting future conflict. Thompson's 2001 article Identifying rivals and rivalries in world politics defined strategic rivalries by how decision-makers themselves cast a specific other state as a competitor and an enemy, and built a catalogue of such pairs. The referent is a structured, mutual relationship between two governments, coded from the historical record, and it differs from an individual buyer's dislike of a country's goods and from a group's psychological hostility toward an outgroup.[3]

Unit

A hostile relationship between a pair of states

Recovery means

Ends when both states stop treating each other as competitors and threats, often after a settlement or shock

Measured by

Identified from the historical record by coding whether leaders name a specific state as a competitor, threat, and enemy