
Caleb WarrenUniversity of Arizona | UA · Department of Marketing
Caleb Warren
PhD
About
36
Publications
36,228
Reads
How we measure 'reads'
A 'read' is counted each time someone views a publication summary (such as the title, abstract, and list of authors), clicks on a figure, or views or downloads the full-text. Learn more
3,014
Citations
Introduction
I think, write, and teach as a proud member of the Marketing Department at the University of Arizona. I think about what makes things funny, what makes things cool, and what helps people reach their goals. I write about these ideas in academic journals, including the Journal of Consumer Research, Journal of Marketing, Journal of Personality & Social Psychology, and Psychological Science.
Skills and Expertise
Additional affiliations
July 2016 - present
August 2013 - June 2016
September 2010 - July 2013
Publications
Publications (36)
Is trying to earn status effective or self‐defeating? We show that whether effort increases or decreases admiration and respect (i.e., status) depends on how the person is trying to earn status. Groups evaluate people along multiple status dimensions (e.g., wealth, coolness). Each dimension is associated with a different ideology, or set of beliefs...
Purpose
To evaluate if nudges delivered by text message prior to an upcoming primary care visit can increase influenza vaccination rates.
Design
Randomized, controlled trial.
Setting
Two health systems in the Northeastern US between September 2020 and March 2021.
Subjects
74,811 adults.
Interventions
Patients in the 19 intervention arms receive...
Significance
Encouraging vaccination is a pressing policy problem. Our megastudy with 689,693 Walmart pharmacy customers demonstrates that text-based reminders can encourage pharmacy vaccination and establishes what kinds of messages work best. We tested 22 different text reminders using a variety of different behavioral science principles to nudge...
Many Americans fail to get life-saving vaccines each year, and the availability of a vaccine for COVID-19 makes the challenge of encouraging vaccination more urgent than ever. We present a large field experiment ( N = 47,306) testing 19 nudges delivered to patients via text message and designed to boost adoption of the influenza vaccine. Our findin...
Academia is a marketplace of ideas. Just as firms market their products with packaging and advertising, scholars market their ideas with writing. Even the best ideas will make an impact only if others understand and build upon them. Why, then, is academic writing often difficult to understand? By conducting two experiments and analyzing the text of...
Brands regularly attempt to stimulate consumer engagement by posting messages on social media platforms (e.g., Facebook), but their messages are often ignored. How can managers write social media messages that engage consumers? The present research sheds light on how the language of brand messages influences consumer engagement. Text analyses of br...
Despite the broad importance of humor, psychologists do not agree on the basic elements that cause people to experience laughter, amusement, and the perception that something is funny. There are more than 20 distinct psychological theories that propose appraisals that characterize humor appreciation. Most of these theories leverage a subset of five...
Consumers regularly experience humor while buying and using products, procuring services, and engaging in various consumption experiences, whether watching a movie or dining with colleagues. Despite an expansive literature on how humor influences advertisers’ communication goals, far less is known about how humor appreciation and comedy production...
Ironic consumption refers to using a product (brand, style, behavior, etc.) with the intent of signaling a meaning (identity, message, belief, etc.) that reverses the conventional meaning of the product. We report five studies showing that people are more likely to think that a consumer is using a product ironically when the product is incongruent...
Marketers strive to create cool brands, but the literature does not offer a blueprint for what “brand coolness” means or what features characterize cool brands. This research uses a mixed-methods approach to conceptualize brand coolness and identify a set of characteristics typically associated with cool brands. Focus groups, depth interviews, and...
Humor is a common goal of marketing communications, yet humorous advertisements do not always improve consumer attitudes towards the advertised brand. By investigating a potential downside of attempting to be humorous, our inquiry helps explain why humorous ads can fail to improve and potentially even hurt, brand attitudes. We show that advertiseme...
Despite a recognition that consumers want to be cool and value cool brands, the literature has only just begun to delineate what makes things cool. Writing by scholars, quotes by celebrities, and norms in fashion advertising are consistent with the view that people become cool by being emotionally inexpressive. The relationship between emotional ex...
Humorous advertisements attract attention and entertain consumers. Nonetheless, attempting humor is risky because consumers may be offended by failed humor attempts. We propose another reason that attempting humor is risky: humorous advertisements can hurt brand attitudes by eliciting negative feelings — even when consumers find the ad funny. Three...
After 2.5 millennia of philosophical deliberation and psychological experimentation, most scholars have concluded that humor arises from incongruity. We highlight 2 limitations of incongruity theories of humor. First, incongruity is not consistently defined. The literature describes incongruity in at least 4 ways: surprise, juxtaposition, atypicali...
In a familiar parable, a group of blind men try to discern the shape of an elephant, but each man's perspective differs depending on whether he's touching the trunk, tusk, or tail (Fig. 1). After 2,500 years of studying humor, scientists similarly have differing perspectives on what makes things funny (1). We present three common perspectives on hu...
Although complaints document dissatisfaction, some are also humorous. The article introduces the concept of humorous complaining and draws on the benign violation theory—which proposes that humor arises from things that seem simultaneously wrong yet okay—to examine how being humorous helps and hinders complainers. Six studies, which use social medi...
Consumers often pursue goals (e.g., losing weight) where the chance of attaining the goal increases with some behaviors (e.g., exercise) but decreases with others (e.g., eating). Although goal monitoring is known to be a critical step in self-control for successful goal pursuit, little research investigates whether consumers accurately monitor goal...
Marijuana is widely believed to contribute to bad choices, but we suggest that marijuana’s influence depends on the decision’s context and the standard used to evaluate choices. We examine marijuana’s effect on the widely accepted standard of rationality in economics: utility maximization. Two experiments reveal that marijuana consumption increases...
Sacrificial dilemmas, especially trolley problems, have rapidly become the most recognizable scientific exemplars of moral situations; they are now a familiar part of the psychological literature and are featured prominently in textbooks and the popular press. We are concerned that studies of sacrificial dilemmas may lack experimental, mundane, and...
Despite assertions that coolness sells products, little is known about what leads consumers to perceive brands as cool. This research uses an experimental approach to examine the empirical relationship between consumers’ inferences of autonomy and perceived coolness. Six studies find that behaviors expressing autonomy increase perceived coolness, b...
Humor is a ubiquitous experience that facilitates coping, social coordination, and well-being. We examine how humorous responses to a tragedy change over time by measuring reactions to jokes about Hurricane Sandy. Inconsistent with the belief that the passage of time monotonically increases humor, but consistent with the benign violation theory of...
Humor is ubiquitous and often beneficial, but the conditions that elicit it have been debated for millennia. We examine two factors that jointly influence perceptions of humor: the degree to which a stimulus is a violation (tragedy vs. mishap) and one's perceived distance from the stimulus (far vs. close). Five studies show that tragedies (which fe...
Celebrity endorsement is a common influence tactic used by marketers. By linking their brands with cultural entities such as celebrity endorsers, marketers attempt to acquire positive meanings and personality traits associated with the entity. Entities, however, often have both positive and negative associations. For example, a celebrity can be bot...
Extensive research in the values and preferences literature suggests that preferences are sensitive to context and calculated at the time of choice. This has led to the view that preferences are constructed. Recent work calls for a better understanding of when preferences are constructed and when they are not. We contend that the answer to this que...
Humor is an important, ubiquitous phenomenon; however, seemingly disparate conditions seem to facilitate humor. We integrate these conditions by suggesting that laughter and amusement result from violations that are simultaneously seen as benign. We investigated three conditions that make a violation benign and thus humorous: (a) the presence of an...