Cynthia Cryder

• Washington University in St. Louis

Social interactions can be uncomfortable. The current research focuses on a particularly uneasy interaction that individuals face with their friends and acquaintances: the need to request owed money back. Nine preregistered studies (N = 6,953) show that individuals’ approach to resolving interpersonal debt varies based on their closeness with the r...

For many low- and moderate-income (LMI) households in the U.S., the receipt of the tax refund marks one of the few times during the year when they can build savings. We present findings from a large-scale field experiment designed to encourage LMI tax filers to save their tax refund. The experiment tested combinations of behavioral strategies to pr...

Tax refunds give many low-and moderate-income (LMI) households a rare opportunity to save for unexpected expenses. We conducted three experiments aimed at increasing tax-time savings by LMI consumers. In a large field experiment, the most effective intervention increased the average savings deposits by about 50%. Delivered as people filed taxes onl...

Despite widespread conviction that neediness should be a top priority for charitable giving, this research documents a "charity beauty premium" in which donors often choose beautiful, but less needy, charity recipients instead. The authors propose that donors hold simultaneous yet incongruent preferences of wanting to support beautiful recipients (...

This research investigates whether there are enduring effects of goal achievement and failure within customer loyalty promotion programs. We collaborated with a major hotel chain to launch a large scale field experiment involving 95,532 existing loyalty customers. We observed customers’ hotel stays for eight months before the experiment, eight mont...

Prosocial consumer behavior refers to purchase behavior involving self-sacrifice for the good of others or of society. The research builds off both classic social psychology research on helping and research from the judgment and decision making literature on factors that distort optimal decision making. The research highlights the myriad types of m...

People are more likely to pitch in as charitable campaigns approach their goals. Such "goal gradient helping" occurs in part because late-stage efforts provide donors with a heightened sense of personal impact, an influential source of satisfaction from prosocial acts. Using web robot technology in an Internet field study of micro-lending, Study 1...

Mechanical Turk (MTurk), an online labor system run by Amazon.com, provides quick, easy, and inexpensive access to online research participants. As use of MTurk has grown, so have questions from behavioral researchers about its participants, reliability, and low compen-sation. In this article, we review recent research about MTurk and compare MTurk...

Recent research finds that people respond more generously to individual victims described in detail than to equivalent statistical victims described in general terms. We propose that this “identified victim effect” is one manifestation of a more general phenomenon: a positive influence of tangible information on generosity. In three experiments, we...

Early investigations of guilt cast it as an emotion that prompts broad reparative behaviors that help guilty individuals feel better about themselves or about their transgressions. The current investigation found support for a more recent representation of guilt as an emotion designed to identify and correct specific social offenses. Across five ex...

People share significantly more money with others in common lab paradigms like the dictator game than they do in real life. What accounts for this difference? Paradigms like the dictator game link each recipient to a single dictator with the implication that each recipient can receive funds from only one person. We argue that this “burden” of respo...

When consumers carry multiple debts, how do they decide which debt to repay first? Normatively, consumers should repay the debt with the highest interest rate most quickly. However, because people tend to break complicated tasks into more manageable parts, and because losses are most distressing when segregated, the authors hypothesize that people...

Recent research finds that people respond more generously to identified victims compared to abstract victims. For example, people are more generous towards a single, identified victim compared to a group of victims (Kogut & Ritov, 2005) and compared to a single unidentified (i.e., not yet determined) victim (Small &d Loewenstein, 2003). In this cha...

In research involving human subjects, large participation payments often are deemed undesirable because they may provide 'undue inducement' for potential participants to expose themselves to risk. However, although large incentives may encourage participation, they also may signal the riskiness of a study's procedures. In three experiments, we meas...

Misery is not miserly: Sadness increases the amount of money that decision makers give up to acquire a commodity. The present research investigated when and why the misery-is-not-miserly effect occurs. Drawing on William James's concept of the material self, we tested a model specifying relationships among sadness, self-focus, and the amount of mon...

Consumers often behave differently than they would ideally like to behave. We propose that an anticipatory pain of paying drives “tightwads” to spend less than they would ideally like to spend. “Spendthrifts,” by contrast, experience too little pain of paying and typically spend more than they would ideally like to spend. This article introduces an...