Amit Bhattacharjee

University of Colorado Boulder | CUB · Division of Marketing

Profit-seeking firms are stereotypically depicted as immoral and harmful to society. At the same time, profit-driven enterprise has contributed immensely to human prosperity. Though scholars agree that profit can incentivize societally beneficial behaviors, people may neglect this possibility. In 7 studies, we show that people see business profit a...

Prior research indicates that experiences bring greater happiness than material possessions, but which experiences result in the greatest happiness? The current investigation is one of the first to categorize types of experiences and highlights one important distinction: the extent to which an experience is ordinary (common and frequent) versus ext...

What reasoning processes do consumers use to support public figures who act immorally? Existing research emphasizes moral rationalization, whereby people reconstrue improper behavior in order to maintain support for a transgressor. In contrast, the current research proposes that people also engage in moral decoupling, a previously unstudied moral r...

Consumers prefer brands positioned around identities they possess. Accordingly, the consumer identity literature emphasizes the importance of a clear fit between brands and target identities, suggesting that identity marketing that explicitly links brands to consumer identity should be most effective. In contrast, five studies demonstrate that expl...

Although producers are often evaluated favorably for demonstrating a willingness to change their products to satisfy consumer needs, there may be important exceptions. Five experiments identify a fundamental difference between markets for commercial and artistic products. Consumers reward commercial producers who focus on satisfying consumer tastes...

Consumer psychology refers to how people think and act within an economic role in market exchange. However, we know little about how consumers actually perceive these roles, or how they understand markets and economic activity more broadly. That is, we lack an understanding of the economic reasoning of non‐expert consumers, how it departs from form...

The assumption that consumers prefer better quality options over worse ones seems almost definitional. However, a variety of marketplace examples suggest that consumers sometimes choose content that is “so bad it's good,” such as Tommy Wiseau's The Room or Rebecca Black's “Friday,” over apparently better alternatives (e.g., those of mediocre qualit...

Self-control refers to the ability to choose options with greater long-term benefits over more immediately tempting options. For personal choices that do not affect others, self-control is often conceptualized as morally irrelevant. However, four focal experiments and five supplemental experiments demonstrate that self-control success in apparently...

How can we maximize what is learned from a replication study? In the creative destruction approach to replication, the original hypothesis is compared not only to the null hypothesis, but also to predictions derived from multiple alternative theoretical accounts of the phenomenon. To this end, new populations and measures are included in the design...

How can we maximize what is learned from a replication study? In the creative destruction approach to replication, the original hypothesis is compared not only to the null hypothesis, but also to predictions derived from multiple alternative theoretical accounts of the phenomenon. To this end, new populations and measures are included in the design...

How can we maximize what is learned from a replication study? In the creative destruction approach to replication, the original hypothesis is compared not only to the null hypothesis, but also to predictions derived from multiple alternative theoretical accounts of the phenomenon. To this end, new populations and measures are included in the design...

We propose that autonomy is a crucial aspect of consumer choice. We offer a definition that situates autonomy among related constructs in philosophy and psychology, contrast actual with perceived autonomy in consumer contexts, examine the resilience of perceived autonomy, and sketch out an agenda for research into the role of perceived autonomy in...

We applaud Boyer & Petersen's (B&P's) approach to a fascinating topic. Their arguments against understanding folk-economic beliefs (FEBs) in terms of economic ignorance or specific biases, however, are overly pessimistic. Economic theory is the reason beliefs about such disparate phenomena are labeled “economic” and “folk.” More importantly, some F...

Although firms can profit through either harmful or beneficial practices, six studies show that consumers readily perceive the harmful incentives of profit while neglecting its incentives for good. Studies 1 and 2 find a strong negative correlation between profit and perceived social value across real U.S. firms and entire industries: business prof...

This research explores the impact of weight management remedy marketing on healthy lifestyle behaviors. Three studies demonstrate that exposure to drug (but not supplement) marketing for weight management encourages unhealthy consumer behavior, due to consumers' reliance on erroneous beliefs about health remedies. The authors explore the possible m...

Decades of consumer research suggest that targeting consumers’ core beliefs via identity marketing leads to increased purchase and deeper loyalty. Presumably, identity marketing messages that explicitly link purchase to consumer identity expression are most clearly intended for the target segment, and should thus be most effective. Our results indi...

A mediation model using a sample of 1059 adolescents (56% girls; M age=16.02, SD=1.37) tested relations between parenting, adolescent moral identity, and the formation of psychological distance towards others. In short, adolescent moral identity mediated relations between parenting and the ways in which adolescents oriented others in their psycholo...

Two studies investigated the psychometric properties of a self-report measure of commonly recognized forms of aggression (FOA) that could be used to efficiently gather aggression data in large samples. EFA and CFA in Study 1 suggested that a five-factor model (Physical, Property, Verbal, Relational, and Passive-Rational) best represented the data a...