David H. Silvera

• The University of Texas at San Antonio

The world of cosmetic surgery offers a variety of procedures designed to “enhance” specific body parts. While some consumers are adamantly against such procedures, others seem inherently drawn to them. What type of consumer is most likely to undergo cosmetic procedures? The current research examines whether individual differences in holistic and an...

Service and sales personnel researchers have long been interested in the effects of physical appearance on sales and service outcomes. In the current work, we examine a specific physical feature—facial hair. Interestingly, evolutionary psychologists have found that facial hair does not consistently increase perceived attractiveness (Dixson and Vase...

Purpose This paper aims to investigate how the use of varying amounts of makeup by sales personnel influences perceived salesperson trustworthiness and downstream purchase intentions/sales effectiveness. Design/methodology/approach Two studies were run with female and male makeup usage examined separately. In each study, a between-subjects, scenar...

Self-generated thought has been shown to have a significant impact on attitude change. Merely thinking about an attitude can result in more extreme attitudes. Although research in this area has investigated several moderating factors, most of the research looks at constraints that attenuate but do not reverse the effect (depolarization). The curren...

In decision making under risk, do consumers evaluate intangible, experiential options in a choice set in the same way they evaluate tangible, material options? Prior research on prospect theory, typically using either monetary or material objects as choice options, demonstrates that consumers are risk averse for choices involving gains, with a fair...

Small‐dollar credit lenders offer consumers quick access to cash in the form of products such as pawn loans. The consumers who tend to use these small‐dollar credit products are more likely to face financial burden and potential for default— particularly when loan‐to‐value ratios are high. However, the cognitive effects of financial burden can impa...

We propose that attributions about an endorser truly liking, using, or desiring a promoted product mediate the relationship between source and message factors and persuasion via endorsement. In this paper, we integrate the persuasion literature into a framework for examining endorser effectiveness via focus factors (e.g., involvement, cognitive loa...

Some recent advertisements attempt to increase persuasiveness by directly asking consumers to imagine arguments supporting the ad's message. This research provides a critical test of the effectiveness of this imagine strategy, while also identifying specific situations in which this technique can be most effective in increasing persuasion. Three st...

Using celebrity endorsers can be an effective way to influence brand perceptions and elevate the brand. However, although there is a significant amount of research investigating how endorsers influence brand perceptions, there is little research showing whether traits associated with the brand influence perceptions of the endorser. This article add...

Previous research indicates that superficial details can influence judgments about science. The current research investigated whether the content of research influences judgments about whether research is scientific. In Experiment 1, participants judged topics and equipment associated with natural science to be more scientific than topics and equip...

Two experiments tested the "bigger is better" (BIB) effect, whereby bigger objects are perceived more favorably than smaller ones. In Experiment 1, participants directly compared pairs of objects and a strong BIB effect was obtained for both positively and negatively valenced stimuli. In Experiment 2, comparative and absolute evaluations were combi...

Purpose ‐ This article aims to examine differences between older and younger consumers in their reactions to a product harm crisis. Research suggests that motivational and cognitive changes due to aging might cause information to be differentially utilized. The authors use primary and secondary control influences on information processing to explai...

Purpose This paper aims to examine how different ways in which a charitable organization communicates successes (highlighting individual or collective achievement) can influence potential future donors, and to determine whether the effectiveness of the communication strategy is contingent on the cultural context. Design/methodology/approach Experi...

This paper examines how country of origin, in particular country of manufacture (COM), impacts the assessment of blame by observers to a product-harm crisis when information is unclear as to a firm's culpability for the crisis. In a pilot study and experiment involving three product categories, we find evidence that a negative country of manufactur...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to explore the cross‐cultural efficacy of a gender identity scale commonly used in marketing: the shortened version of the Bem Sex Role Inventory (BSRI) measure developed by Barak and Stern, the Gender Trait Index (GTI). Design/methodology/approach – Data were collected in the USA, Mexico, and Norway, and con...

A large body of research has investigated how perceivers integrate a target’s behavior with information about situational forces. However, little research has investigated how the willingness with which a behavior is performed affects inferences. Two experiments examined the effect of behavioral willingness on dispositional inferences. In experimen...

The Basic Character Inventory (BCI) contains 136 items, 17 lower-order personality factors and three higher-order personality factors derived from psychoanalytic theory: Oral, Obsessive Compulsion, and Hysteria. Previous research that investigated the BCI's psychometric properties examined small, special populations and did not use modern statistic...

This study investigated the relationship between bonding patterns and self-concept, and the influence of these constructs on a measure of sub-clinical eating disturbances. Undergraduate students from the United States (N=166) and Norway (N=233) were given self-report questionnaires that included measures of parental bonding, locus of control, self-...

Purpose – The purpose of this research is to examine predictors of impulse buying. Although moderate levels of impulse buying can be pleasant and gratifying, recent theoretical work suggests that chronic, high frequency impulse buying has a compulsive element and can function as a form of escape from negative affective states, depression, and low s...

Two experiments investigated the effectiveness of two new procedures for improving judgment by increasing sensitivity to missing information. When consumers are insensitive to important missing information, overly extreme product evaluations are formed. However, when consumers are sensitive to important missing information, they form more moderate...

Fault trees are used to organize potential causes of a problem to facilitate better judgments about potential problem solutions. However, fault trees can lead to biased judgments because decision makers tend to overestimate the likelihood of problem causes that are explicitly mentioned in the fault tree and underestimate the likelihood of problem c...

Health psychologists have given surprisingly little attention to consumer behavior. This study focuses on the relationship between an impulsive consumer style and unhealthy eating. In a survey, moderate to strong correlations were found between low self-esteem, dispositional negative affect, impulse buying tendency, snacking habit, and eating distu...

Purpose This cross‐cultural study examines inter‐relationships between values (using the list of values), collective self‐esteem (CSE), and consumer susceptibility to interpersonal influence (CSII). Design/methodology/approach Data were collected through surveys administered to 783 university students in four countries (Australia, English‐speaking...

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY Recently, a number of articles suggest that consumer segments assess blame differently for a product harm crisis. For example, Laufer and Gillespie (2004) found in two separate experiments that women blame a company more than men for a product harm crisis in which it is unclear whether the company, consumers, or situational factor...

This multi-country study examines differences in attitudes toward drinking among university students in Canada, Australia, Norway, and Korea. In addition, the relationships between attitudes toward drinking and personal values, social identity, and social influence are examined. Results showed that Koreans had the most favorable attitudes toward dr...

This research examines whether consumers infer that celebrity endorsers like the products they endorse, and presents a model using these inferences and other characteristics of the endorser to predict attitudes toward the endorsed product. Participants in two experiments examined written endorsement advertisements and were asked to infer the extent...

The “better-than-average” effect, the tendency for people to view themselves as above average on positive characteristics but belowaverage on negative characteristics, is an important manifestation of the motive for self-enhancement. The present research examined whether the better-than-average effect occurred in Norway, a country with strong norms...

People often seek out and retain positive information about themselves via self-enhancement processes. Under other circumstances, they seek out and retain self-confirmatory information via self-verification processes. Research on both of these self-evaluation processes has been based heavily on domains such as social skills, in which people have a...

This study examines the condom purchasing and use habits of 256 college students in Norway and English-speaking Canada, and develops a structural equation model to explain condom purchase and use. In the model, intention to purchase condoms is influenced by self-efficacy in condom purchasing, as well as by intention to use condoms. Intention to use...

The effect of a peer endorsement advertisement on research participants' attitudes toward the advertised product was examined. An advertisement for a Seiko watch and a questionnaire were administered to participants. The degree of dispositional attributions regarding the endorser's motivation and participants' subsequent attitudes associated with t...

This article describes both formal and informal aspects of doctoral training of psychology students in the United States. We first describe admission procedures and the financial support of doctoral students and then discuss the various milestones in a typical doctoral program. There follows an overview of what is expected of doctoral students and...

In this study, we explored 3 psychodynamically defined personality traits as predictors of eating disturbances among men and women in the general population. The Basic Character Inventory (Torgersen, 1980) was used to measure oral, obsessive, and hysteria traits along with the Eating Disturbance Scale (Rosenvinge et al., 2001). Oral personality fac...

The hypothesis that the physical size of an object can influence aesthetic preferences was investigated. In a series of four experiments, participants were presented with pairs of abstract stimuli and asked to indicate which member of each pair they preferred. A preference for larger stimuli was found on the majority of trials using various types o...

Previous research suggests that people process pleasant information more efficiently than unpleasant information. This phenomenon has been illustrated in a variety of contexts and paradigms, and is frequently referred to as the Pollyanna principle. One important aspect of the Pollyanna principle is that people tend to retrieve pleasant members of a...

Although global self–esteem has historically been assumed to be a unidimensional construct, recent theory and research has challenged this assumption. Instead, it has been suggested that self–esteem might more fruitfully be viewed as a two–dimensional construct composed of: (a) self–liking, based on our perceptions of feedback from our social envir...

Seasonal deviations in normal eating habits have been associated with seasonal affective disorder (SAD) and bulimia nervosa (BN). Two studies on seasonal variation in eating habits are reported in this paper. In Study 1, seasonal patterns of eating disturbances were measured cross-sectionally in 6313 participants using an eating disturbance scale (...

Social intelligence is a construct that not only appeals to laymen as a relevant individual difference but also has shown promising practical applications. Nevertheless, the use of social intelligence in research and applied settings has been limited by definitional problems, difficulties in empirically differentiating social intelligence from rela...

Emotions seem to have the quality of being evoked by situational forces. If people assume the presence of situational forces for emotions, trait inferences for emotions may be less correspondent even when situations are invisible. Moreover, a manipulation of situational constraint information should have relatively little impact on trait inferences...

How do people evaluate their degree of mastery over a task? A series of four studies demonstrated that a potentially irrelevant cue can have a strong influence on such evaluations. In these studies, the total amount of work given to participants (the problem set size) influenced both (a) the amount of work participants completed before feeling that...

This paper reports on the development and validation of a brief scale, the Eating Disturbance Scale (EDS-5), as a screening instrument for problematic eating disorders in normal populations. A nationwide sample of 6313 subjects completed 22 questions about eating patterns. Using principal component analysis, these questions were cut down to five it...

The influence of implicit theories of personality (entity vs. incremental theorists; see Dweck, Chiu and Hong, 1995) on the stages of the Sequential Operations Model of attribution (Gilbert, Pelham, and Krull, 1988) was investigated. Two hundred eighty Norwegian participants were given a Norwegian translation of the implicit personality theories me...

Past research has demonstrated that observers tend to underestimate the importance of situational determinants (e.g. task difficulty) of the performances of others. This tendency is particularly pronounced when observers are unmotivated, distracted or otherwise 'cognitively busy' while making attributional judgments. The objective of the present re...

Confidence in personality impressions is proposed to stem from the richness of people's mental representations of others. Representational richness produces confidence because it enhances the fluency with which people can make judgments, and it increases confidence even when it does not result in more accurate impressions. Results of 3 experiments...

Confidence in personality impressions is proposed to stem from the richness of people's mental representations of others. Representational richness produces confidence because it enhances the fluency with which people can make judgments, and it increases confidence even when it does not result in more accurate impressions. Results of 3 experiments...

Research in the past has demonstrated an association between low self-esteem and eating disorders. Recent research on self-esteem has shown, however, that self-esteem is composed of two distinct factors--self-liking and self-competence. The present study examined the relation between these two self-esteem factors and both eating disorders and eatin...

Past research supports a sequential model of person perception that begins with automatic categorization of the behavior and ends with effortful correction for situational constraints (Gilbert, Pelham, & Krull, 1988). Assuming that logical reasoning skills and motivation may limit one's ability to process attributional information, the relationship...

Recent studies have shown that the relationship between poor self-esteem and disturbed eating patterns may be more fully understood when the self-esteem concept is divided into an affective domain ('self-liking') and a cognitive domain ('self-competence'). In the present study 38 overweight women between the ages of 21 and 68 participated in an 8-w...

Overhelping occurs when one attempts to spoil an observer's impression of a performer by explicitly helping the performer achieve a goal, thereby inviting the observer to attribute the performer's success to the help. The results of 4 experiments suggest (a) that people are most likely to overhelp when they believe that their interventions will be...

A series of 4 experiments demonstrated that when practicing for a test of problem solving, recognition and selection of a particular stopping signal was shown to depend on the within-set variability (statistical noise) of a problem set. When noise was high, participants used a nondiagnostic stopping signal based on the initial size of the problem s...

We identified two characteristics of the impression formation process that may cause people to underestimate the riskiness of potential sexual partners. In Study 1, participants were quite confident that they could determine whether someone was lying to them about risk-related behavior when, in reality, they could not. Particularly troubling was a...

Presents 5 studies that demonstrate the influence of computationally simple quantity information on judgment and the regulation of behavior. Study 1 revealed that 38 undergraduate Ss used the height of a pile of pages of text to judge their proofreading performance, even when pile size was obviously not determined by the amount of text proofread. I...

This paper contributes empirically to our understanding of informed traders. It analyzes traders' characteristics in a foreign exchange electronic limit order market via anonymous trader identities. We use six indicators of informed trading in a cross-sectional multivariate approach to identify traders with high price impact. More information is co...

Previous research indicates that older consumers have a reduced capacity to engage in primary control behaviors that involve active responses to counteract threats, and thus compensate with secondary control processes that involve perceiving negative events as less threatening. Two studies were conducted to examine secondary control processes in ol...