Journal of Consumer Psychology

Six studies ( N = 1548) and a single ad study on Facebook examine the influence of political ideology on the likelihood of accepting AI‐generated recommendations in categories such as movie streaming, music streaming, and recipe websites. Contrary to conventional wisdom and prior empirical findings that conservatives are less accepting of technology, the current research finds that conservatives are more likely than liberals to accept AI‐generated recommendations. This occurs because conservatives have a higher resistance to change in general, which leads them to have a greater preference for consistency in consumption contexts. Consequently, given the widely held belief that AI‐generated recommendations are primarily based on one's own past preferences and behaviors, such recommendations are found to be more appealing to conservatives than liberals. However, this effect is attenuated when consumers recognize or infer that the AI lacks knowledge of their past preferences and behaviors. These findings contribute to the literature on the predictive power of political ideology for a litany of consumption‐relevant behaviors while also adding nuance to our understanding of the relationship between political ideology and acceptance of new technology.

Rim, Schertz, and Berman ( Journal of Consumer Psychology , 2025) present prior research examining the affective, cognitive, and social benefits of humans' interactions with nature. In doing so, they offer some specific applications to consumer psychology and encourage more research examining the consequences of nature interaction on consumer behaviors. We build on this important work by considering the breadth of potential forms of interaction between consumers and nature in both indoor and outdoor spaces as well as in real and virtual (i.e., representations of) nature exposures. We build on semantic activation and goal‐systems theory to elaborate further on how nature can influence consumers. Specifically, associations elicited by nature can activate or enhance the importance of certain goals during the consumption process, thus driving consumers' judgments and decision‐making. We elaborate on how nature can be specifically applied to the place, product, and promotion elements of the marketing mix and how future research can examine the consequences of nature interactions on consumer behavior.

The surrounding environment influences how people feel, think, and behave. This effect is apparent when examining the multitude of ways interactions with natural environments impact people psychologically. In this Research Dialogue, we discuss work by ourselves and others that demonstrate the benefits of spending time in nature or interacting with natural stimuli, across three psychological domains. First, we discuss affective benefits, such as improved mood and decreased stress and rumination. Then, we discuss cognitive benefits, such as improved working memory. Lastly, we discuss social benefits, such as prosocial and proenvironmental attitudes. We introduce several environmental psychology theories that try to explain why these benefits occur. We present our own work that attempts to determine what characteristics of natural environments cause or are related to these effects by quantifying distinguishing characteristics of natural versus built environments along a variety of dimensions. We then investigate how these dimensions influence the psychological experience in a more natural versus a more built environment. We end by outlining the implications of the benefits of interacting with nature in influencing consumer behaviors.

In the primary article of this research dialogue ( Journal of Consumer Psychology , 2025), we outlined the social, cognitive, and affective benefits of interacting with nature and briefly discussed the relevance of this work to consumer psychology. In their commentary to our primary article, Haws and Yamim approached nature purely within the marketplace setting and discussed how consumer exposure to natural elements may activate semantic networks that will predictably influence consumer behavior. We contextualized the current response to this commentary under the umbrella of sustainability and sustainable consumer decisions. First, we clarify attention restoration theory, stress reduction theory, and assumptions regarding the preference for nature. Second, we discuss definitions of nature from an interdisciplinary perspective. Building upon this, we speak to the potential semantic activations suggested by Haws and Yamim in response to nature exposure, probing potential individual and group‐level variations and the relevance of these differences in the consumer space. Finally, we discuss potential conflicts of utilizing nature in the marketplace embedded within the perspective of sustainability goals. In this sense, we question the consequences and ethical considerations of employing nature as a mechanism to influence consumer behavior.

Companies are increasingly adopting self‐customization, allowing customers to create personalized products. In the food and beverage industry, this is often provided at no extra cost. While most consumers believe that adding more options maximizes the benefit in self‐customization, which leads companies to adopt pay‐per‐add pricing models to manage costs, this logic does not always hold in food consumption. In this context, adding more can compromise health goals and diminish the taste experience. Across a field study conducted with a pizza restaurant that temporarily switched from a fixed à‐la‐carte menu to a self‐customization menu and two controlled experiments, we demonstrate that self‐customization in indulgent contexts leads to healthier choices—pizzas with fewer calories and fat calories—by enhancing a sense of autonomy. We further identify a boundary condition, where the positive effect of self‐customization diminishes in healthy contexts, such as when choosing a salad.

Despite the growing interest in studying the psychology of scarcity and its effect on consumers, little research has investigated whether the effect of resource scarcity depends on the type of scarce resource. Across six studies, we identify the distinct psychological and decision‐making consequences of two types of resource scarcity: time and money. We hypothesize that time and money scarcity can differentially influence consumer preferences by altering self‐perceptions. Time (vs. money) scarcity leads to perceiving the self as a scarce resource, and these self‐perceptions result in time‐ (vs. money‐) scarce consumers drawing more favorable assessments of self‐value and preferring options that reflect their heightened self‐value. Furthermore, we demonstrate that the differential effect of time versus money scarcity only holds for consumption choices reflecting self‐value. We also identify an important moderating condition: the source of the experience of scarcity, specifically whether it was self‐chosen or not.

Agents help consumers make decisions. While agents have traditionally been human (e.g., sales associate, real estate agent, financial advisor), artificial intelligence (AI) agents are becoming more prevalent. We find that the type of agent, AI versus human, has an influence on intertemporal judgment. Specifically, when an agent is identified as AI, the concept of fast processing becomes more accessible, which makes time delays seem subjectively longer and encourages impatient behavior. These results have implications for how to conceptualize the influence of AI agents on judgment, the impact of time perception on intertemporal choices, and the sources of impatient behavior.

Large Language Models have been incorporated into an astounding breadth of professional domains. Given their capabilities, many intellectual laborers naturally question to what extent these AI models will be able to usurp their own jobs. As behavioral scientists, we performed an effort to examine the extent to which an AI can perform our roles. To achieve this, we utilized commercially available AIs (e.g., ChatGPT 4) to perform each step of the research process, culminating in an AI‐written manuscript. We attempted to intervene as little as possible in the AI‐led idea generation, empirical testing, analysis, and reporting. This allowed us to assess the limits of AIs in a behavioral research context and propose guidelines for behavioral researchers wanting to utilize AI. We found that the AIs were adept at some parts of the process and wholly inadequate at others. Our overall recommendation is that behavioral researchers use AIs judiciously and carefully monitor the outputs for quality and coherence. We additionally draw implications for editorial teams, doctoral student training, and the broader research ecosystem.

Below are comments on Tomaino, Cooke, and Hoover by four teams of collaborative reviewers that helped clarify and focus its original version. Their comments on the refined version articulate how the fast‐moving world of generative AI can alter authors, readers, reviewers, and consumer behavior journals. In the first comment, Blythe, Kulis, and McGraw propose that Generative AI requires substantial effort to generate research that is fast, cost‐effective, and of high quality. They articulate three recommendations: to ask, to train, and to check the system. Asking builds on GenAI's ability to reveal its own capabilities at different stages of the research process. Training allows the system to be customized with relevant context, domain‐specific documents, and tailored examples, enhancing its accuracy and reducing errors. Checking is strongly advised to validate that the outputs are both reasonable and robust. Haenlein, Hewett, and Yoo build on the capabilities of Large Language Models that go beyond the research practices central to consumer psychology. They outline strategic prompting strategies: starting broadly and gradually narrowing to specific domains, downloading information from relevant articles and data that is unlikely to be part of the current corpus, and evoking specific theories, methods, or presentation formats. They also elaborate on the ways the apparent magic of GenAI may raise learning or ethical challenges. The third comment by Stacy Wood focuses less on the capabilities of GenAI and more on how its adoption will depend on researcher feelings—in other words, how different aspects of its use may alter researchers' experiences of doing research and their identities as scholars. GenAI has the potential to both build (through increased productivity or increased accessibility) and limit (through loss of agency or faster production) pride of purpose in research. She argues that feelings from using GenAI are likely to differ across research steps, from developing novel concepts, processes, analyses, and writing of the paper. Wherever GenAI may lessen the excitement, satisfaction, motivation, and perceived status of the researcher, barriers to its use are likely to be erected. Finally, Vicki Morwitz identifies new AI capabilities beyond those explored in Tomaino et al. Those include the ability to generate synthetic data that can guide empirical experiments, a facility to create audio and visual stimuli, a capability to study group behavior, and a capacity to reliably interpret complex human statements. The comment then closes with important questions for editorial policies, raising issues about limitations on AI use by authors, its appropriate applications by review teams, and possible publishers' restrictions on uploading copyrighted articles.

Despite increasing attention to alternative market systems, where consumers perform considerable voluntary labor, consumer researchers have a limited understanding of the nature or implications of the emotion work entailed in making such contributions. This paper addresses this gap, focusing on “committed consumers” defined as those who provide extensive volunteer labor to support alternative markets and their principles. It does so based on hermeneutic analysis of ethnographic and netnographic data collected from participants in local food markets (REKO markets) in Norway. The paper identifies four distinct types of institutional emotion work that contribute to perpetuating alternative markets and conceptualizes how committed consumers' own emotions are affected when making such contributions. This paper extends our understanding of consumers' roles in alternative market systems and of the socially constituted and constitutive emotions entailed in consumer volunteerism.

Markets are shaped by innovation and choice. Drawing upon advances in the scientific study of awe, in this article I present a model that details how experiences of this emotion shape innovation and choice. I first detail the latest science on awe, which finds it to be distinct from closely related states, like beauty, interest, admiration, and fear, and that orients individuals to rigorous, systems‐based, meaning‐making thought, and actions that enhance social integration. I then summarize how awe leads to a mental state of wonder and curiosity, a fertile ground for the creation of cultural forms through acts of innovation. As illustrations, I consider how awe leads to creative representation, symbolic expression, ritualization, and object design. To the extent that these cultural creations are touched by awe, I then reason, they will fare well in terms of choice, a process whose discussion is the concern in the last section of this article.

This article builds on Keltner's conceptual model of awe, innovation, and choice (Keltner, 2025). This article expands on the framework in two main ways by outlining (1) when awe could have positive versus negative consequences for consumer choice and (2) how focusing on distinctive aspects of the consumer behavior setting may further enhance understanding of awe. Building on these themes, this article proposes several areas for research: examining granular aspects of the core appraisals, further characterizing different cognitive functions, considering consequences for different consumer choice domains (e.g., decision making, indulgence, customization), and focusing on how different kinds of relationships (e.g., brand communities), types of prosocial action (e.g., donating vs. volunteering), and forms of brand generated awe (direct vs. indirect) impact consumer behavior. This article offers specific propositions to encourage future research on how awe may impact consumers and brands.

Prior scholarship characterizes awe as an aesthetic emotion, and the rich and growing aesthetics literature can help illuminate the role of awe in consumer psychology. The current commentary draws on this literature, as well as Keltner's conceptual analysis of awe, to highlight findings and remaining questions pertaining to awe in the realm of consumption. Marketing activities such as branding and promotion, store design, and product development present opportunities to awe consumers, yet awesome consumption experiences are rare. The current work discusses characteristics of awe‐inspiring products and brands, the tendency of awe to increase or decrease consumption, relevant individual differences between consumers, and the nature and evolutionary background of awe and aesthetics.

Despite evidence that people believe that the unhealthier the food, the tastier it is, some studies also suggest the opposing belief—the healthier the food, the tastier it is. A framework is proposed to reconcile this contradiction, and four studies demonstrate that the discrete categorization of foods as healthful versus unhealthful determines which intuition consumers use. When stereotypically unhealthy foods (e.g., candies, ice cream, hot dogs) are encountered, they are automatically categorized as unhealthful and the properties associated with that category (e.g., sweetness, saltiness, fat content) become accessible. Inferences about taste are then based on these properties and the unhealthier the encountered products are (i.e., the higher the sugar and fat content they have), the tastier they are perceived to be (unhealthy = tasty belief). Conversely, when stereotypically healthful foods (e.g., fruits) are encountered, other properties (e.g., freshness, vitamins) become salient, and tastiness is mainly inferred based on these properties, leading to the inference that the healthier these foods are (i.e., the more freshness and vitamins they have), the tastier they are perceived to be (healthy = tasty belief). Marketers and policymakers can leverage these findings to understand better when emphasizing healthiness benefits or hurts taste perceptions.

The deployment of autonomous vehicles (AVs) and the accompanying societal and economic benefits will greatly depend on how much liability AV firms will have to carry for accidents involving these vehicles, which in turn impacts their insurability and associated insurance premiums. Across three experiments ( N = 2677), we investigate whether accidents where the AV was not at fault could become an unexpected liability risk for AV firms, by exploring consumer perceptions of AV liability. We find that when such accidents occur, the not‐at‐fault vehicle becomes more salient to consumers when it is an AV. As a result, consumers are more likely to view as relevant counterfactuals in which the not‐at‐fault vehicle might have behaved differently to avoid or minimize damage from, the accident. This leads them to judge AV firms as more liable than both firms that make human‐driven vehicles and human drivers for damages when not at fault.

Past work has found that there is often a mismatch between the types of gifts that individuals send and the types of gifts that recipients would prefer to receive. Moving beyond gift choice, the present work explores a novel type of giver–recipient mismatch—beliefs about the importance of sending an on‐time gift. Specifically, the current work offers evidence that gift givers systematically overestimate the negative impact that a late occasion‐based gift will have on their relationship with the recipient, which occurs because gift givers believe that sending a late gift will signal that they care about the recipient to a lesser extent than what the recipient perceives. As such, gift givers' overestimation of relationship harm from a late gift is attenuated when they signal care in some other way (e.g., with the amount of effort put into creating the gift). Finally, we explore the consequences of degree of gift lateness as well as the decision to not send an occasion‐based gift at all on gift givers' overestimation of relationship harm.

This research examines how red ambient color in restaurants/cafeterias influences food choices. Prior research shows that red directly related to a food product (such as on nutrition labels or plates/cups) leads to avoidance of unhealthy foods. Yet, many successful fast‐food restaurants (e.g., McDonald's and Dairy Queen) use red in their ambiance, suggesting that in the context of food/eating, ambient red may have a different meaning than product‐related red. Indeed, the current research shows that consumers associate ambient red (e.g., wall color) with unhealthy restaurants. The presence of ambient red (vs. blue, gray, or white) leads to greater preference for unhealthy (i.e., high calorie, high fat, and indulgent) food options because consumers draw on ambient factors to make inferences about products sold in a retail establishment and then choose contextually appropriate products. The effect is moderated by the extent to which a consumer associates red with unhealthy restaurants. This research highlights how, in the context of food/eating, the placement of red influences its meaning and ultimately whether consumers approach or avoid unhealthy foods.

Home is typically understood as a singular place that provides a sense of groundedness, belonging, and well‐being. Yet, this singular notion of home is challenged in global mobility, where consumers live and travel across borders and relocate internationally frequently. We expect globally mobile consumers to experience multiple and multilayered notions of home with significant psychological consequences for their sense of well‐being, ownership, and identity. In a qualitative study of 40 globally mobile consumers, we examine what it means to have multiple homes and how consumers cope with it. We identified four types of home that coexist in global mobility: emotional home, home away from home, base of operation, and home on the road. These types are characterized by different degrees of permanence and serve different psychological benefits that are at times in opposition or complementary (respectively, belonging and ontological security, functioning and psychological ownership, productivity, and flexibility). We also explored how this home portfolio provokes emotional, social, and cognitive consequences with which globally mobile consumers cope through strategic use of marketplace resources.

We set forth an agenda for Moral Foundations Theory (MFT) research in consumer psychology, focusing in particular on four pathways: (1) factoring in multiple identities, including moral identities, to account for contextual elevation or suppression of moral foundations in predicting which decisions consumers moralize and when; (2) broadening the methodological usage of MFT to include more targeted causal research as well as expanding the utility of correlational research; (3) increasing discriminant validity between MFT and other constructs by studying moral foundations as individually manipulable and focusing on their incremental predictive validity over and above demographics and related constructs; and (4) recognizing that researcher biases regarding morality can leak into the publication process, necessitating clear distinctions between prescriptive versus descriptive research. These pathways facilitate more precise and stronger predictive validity for applying MFT in consumer psychology, yielding greater theoretical and practical utility across researcher perspectives.

Disease detection is critical throughout the consumer lifecycle. Effective communication not only influences consumers' motivation to participate in disease detection but also has a significant impact on prevention outcomes. While previous literature has examined the effectiveness of the gain frame versus the loss frame in motivating detection behaviors, existing studies have produced mixed results, with the underlying psychological process remaining unclear. The present research sheds light on these issues by examining the moderating role of age. Across four experiments, we demonstrate the interactive effects of age and message framing on the effectiveness of health communication advocating disease detection for prevention. We find that as age increases, gain‐framed disease detection appeals become more persuasive than loss‐framed appeals, and that information diagnosticity is one psychological mechanism driving this effect. This research contributes to the literature on framing effects, age differences in information processing, and health compliance persuasion. Our findings also provide insights into how to engage consumers of different ages in disease detection and subsequently enable better prevention and intervention.

Recent technological advancements have empowered nonhuman entities, such as virtual assistants and humanoid robots, to simulate human intelligence and behavior. This paper investigates how autonomous agents influence individuals' perceptions and behaviors toward others, particularly human employees. Our research reveals that the socio‐emotional capabilities of autonomous agents lead individuals to attribute a humanlike mind to these nonhuman entities. Perceiving a high level of humanlike mind in the nonhuman, autonomous agents affects perceptions of actual people through an assimilation process. Consequently, we observe “assimilation‐induced dehumanization”: the humanness judgment of actual people is assimilated toward the lower humanness judgment of autonomous agents, leading to various forms of mistreatment. We demonstrate that assimilation‐induced dehumanization is mitigated when autonomous agents possess capabilities incompatible with humans, leading to a contrast effect (Study 2), and when autonomous agents are perceived as having a high level of cognitive capability only, resulting in a lower level of mind perception of these agents (Study 3). Our findings hold across various types of autonomous agents (embodied: Studies 1–2 and disembodied: Studies 3–5), as well as in real and hypothetical consumer choices.

Repeat consumption, a common aspect of consumers' daily lives, often results in hedonic adaptation such as satiation or boredom. In line with a growing body of research exploring methods to alleviate hedonic adaptation, this research proposes and finds that creative thinking can effectively reduce hedonic adaptation. Through five experiments conducted across various consumption contexts (music listening, video watching, photograph viewing, snack eating), we show that creative thinking reduces hedonic adaptation by fostering cognitive flexibility during repeat consumption (e.g., enjoying the same photograph from different aspects across repetitions). Supporting this underlying mechanism, the mitigating effect of creative thinking on hedonic adaptation attenuates when consumers' cognitive flexibility is constrained, or when the product itself possesses sufficient complexity that naturally encourages cognitive flexibility over repetitions. Overall, this research sheds light on how creative thinking helps alleviate hedonic adaptation in repeat consumption, with implications for marketing managers and practitioners.

If you are having a hard day, what can someone else do to help you feel better? Maybe they could verbally comfort you or maybe they could give you a small gift. In seven studies, including an in‐person real gifting study, we find that receiving a small material gift, such as a candy bar or flowers, improves receivers' affect more than a supportive conversation with a close other does. We investigate the mechanism for this effect and find that support receivers perceive a gift to be a larger sacrifice than a conversation. This occurs because gifts seem more receiver‐focused (i.e., actions done solely to benefit the receiver) than do conversations. This difference in perceived sacrifice makes gifts (vs. conversations) more effective at promoting emotional recovery.

Social platforms facilitate the daily interactions of billions of people globally. Prior research generally concludes that social platforms negatively affect people's welfare. This research reopens this debate by using a robust methodology to examine the time series effects of social platform use on users' subjective well‐being, psychological well‐being, physical health, and financial security. We report a 6‐month longitudinal study of 1029 adults. Participants' daily time using social platforms on their mobile device was unobtrusively tracked and their well‐being was measured every 2 weeks. The findings suggest a small, positive effect of time spent using social platforms on both subjective well‐being and psychological well‐being (but no significant effects on physical health or financial security). Further, it is time spent using social platforms that facilitate interactions with intimate/close ties, that is correlated with positive subjective and psychological well‐being.

Shteynberg's (Journal of Consumer Psychology, 2024) work on collective consciousness offers unique and meaningful insights into consumer behavior by emphasizing a “we‐representation” that is comprised not of a self‐aware “I” and an external “you” but rather complete immersion as a unified “we”. In this commentary, we situate collective consciousness within existing social presence research in consumer behavior and discuss its potential to expand the scope of social presence research. Specifically, we utilize a social presence framework that highlights the type of co‐presence (in‐person vs. virtual) and the extent of interactivity (interactive vs. passive) discussing the psychological mechanisms and linkage to collective consciousness. In addition to discussing shared consumption and shared decision‐making, we assess the implications of collective consciousness for consumer contexts facilitated by virtual technologies: fake news, live streaming, virtual reality, cryptocurrencies, and crowdfunding. We conclude by highlighting future avenues for integrating collective consciousness into consumer psychology research.