How Cat-Behavior Advisors Can Improve Clients' Willingness to Adopt their Advice: An Investigation of Advice Severity, Advisor Credibility, and Clients' Self-Identity

DOI

Feline behavioral problems can be treated successfully by good advice from cat-behavior advisors, but guardians often do not comply with their advice. An experimental survey under 703 cat guardians was used to investigate what advisors can do to increase their clients’ compliance with environ- mental enrichment advice. By systematically varying the credibility of the advisor and the severity of their advice, the hypothesis was confirmed that highly credible advisors elicit more positive attitudes and compliance inten- tions than less credible advisors. Also as expected, mild advice resulted in stronger compliance intentions than severe advice because guardians believed they were better able to incorporate the required actions. Finally, guardians who more strongly thought of themselves as cat guardians were more likely to adopt the advice because they believed that other cat guardians would do the same. The investigation of factors that can increase cat guardians’ compliance with advisors’ recommendations for the treat- ment of behavioral problems is crucial because the wellbeing of domestic cats lies in the hands of their guardians. Several practical recommendations for cat-behavior advisors are offered.

Identifier
DOI https://doi.org/10.34894/WE42WZ
Related Identifier IsCitedBy https://doi.org/10.1080/10888705.2022.2070845.
Metadata Access https://dataverse.nl/oai?verb=GetRecord&metadataPrefix=oai_datacite&identifier=doi:10.34894/WE42WZ
Provenance
Creator van Leeuwen, Esther ORCID logo; ter Mors, Emma; Stolting, Marcellina
Publisher DataverseNL
Contributor van Leeuwen, Esther; ter Mors, Emma; Data Stewards Behavioural Sciences
Publication Year 2023
Rights CC-BY-4.0; info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess; http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
OpenAccess true
Contact van Leeuwen, Esther (Leiden University); ter Mors, Emma (Leiden University); Data Stewards Behavioural Sciences (Leiden University)
Representation
Resource Type Dataset
Format application/zip
Size 124902; 52134; 5119; 17994; 1799904; 2143
Version 1.0
Discipline Agriculture, Forestry, Horticulture, Aquaculture; Agriculture, Forestry, Horticulture, Aquaculture and Veterinary Medicine; Life Sciences; Social Sciences; Social and Behavioural Sciences; Soil Sciences