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Publications (48)
In recent decades, scholars across all areas of marketing have studied consumer gift‐giving behavior. Despite the growing popularity of this research topic, no extensive review of the gift‐giving literature exists. To that end, this paper offers an expansive review of research on consumer gift‐giving, focusing primarily on work coming from within t...
The unfortunate reality of the human condition is that enjoyable experiences become less enjoyable with time and repetition. This hedonic decline has been well documented across a variety of stimuli and experiences. However, previous work has largely ignored the possibility that the temporal profile of hedonic decline varies at the individual level...
We report the results of a survey of the business school academic marketing community conducted in 2019. The goal of the survey was to understand how the organizational climate varied as a function of a variety of demographic descriptors within this field. We provide results for the four sections of the survey—general experience, explicit discrimin...
Most gifts are occasion‐based as opposed to non‐occasion‐based. That is, most gifts are given in the presence of a special occasion, rather than in the absence of one. Across a series of scenario‐based studies, the present research demonstrates that, despite occasion‐based gifts being much more common, recipients anticipate that their happiness lev...
Gift-recipients typically receive multiple gifts in the same sitting, yet little is known about the impact of other gifts on givers’ and recipients’ evaluations of any one gift. Across 12 studies, we demonstrate that givers overestimate how much a recipient’s liking of their (i.e., the giver’s) gift [increases/decreases] when it compares [favorably...
In the present research, we document a novel forecasting bias, which we term the “future is now” (FIN) bias. Specifically, we show that people tend to believe that the future will mirror the present, even when such a belief is unfounded. That is, people overestimate the chances that whatever is happening now, will happen in the future, even when th...
Past research in gift giving has largely treated asymmetries between the types of gifts givers give and the ones recipients prefer to receive as unintentional errors on the part of givers. In contrast, we show that givers sometimes intentionally bypass gifts that they know will bring the most joy and happiness to their recipients. Specifically, we...
Most people have a desire to live in a just world, a place where good things happen to good people and bad things happen to bad people. And yet, injustices do occur: good things happen to bad people and bad things happen to good people. Across four experiments, we show that people respond quite differently to correct these two types of injustices....
We review the phenomenon of hedonic decline, whereby repeated exposure to a stimulus typically reduces the hedonic response (e.g., enjoyment). We first discuss the typical trajectory of hedonic decline and the common research paradigms used to study it. We next discuss the most popular theories regarding general mechanisms widely believed to underl...
Across 4,151 participants, the authors demonstrate a novel framing effect, attribute matching, whereby matching a salient attribute of a decision frame with that of a decision's options facilitates decision-making. This attribute matching is shown to increase decision confidence and, ultimately, consensus estimates by increasing feelings of metacog...
Thankfully, most product consumption experiences are positive. Unfortunately, however, those positive experiences are not always guaranteed, and defects creep into the consumer experience. Though its assertion runs counter to most prescriptions, the current research proposes that exposing consumers to the mere possibility of negative experiences oc...
How much do our choices represent stable inner preferences versus social conformity? We examine conformity and consistency in sartorial choices surrounding a common life event of new norm exposure: relocation. A large-scale dataset of individual purchases of women’s shoes (16,236 transactions) across five years and 2,007 women reveals a balance of...
Histogram of Number of Moves per Customer.
(DOCX)
Supplementary Mediation Analysis.
(DOCX)
Histogram of Number of Transactions per Customer.
(DOCX)
An ecologically valid experiment investigated the propositions that (a) people's judgments are influenced by contextual cues, (b) that they are often unaware that those cues influenced them, and (c) that even when they know the cues should influence them, they do not readily incorporate those cues into their judgment formation. After participating...
Sentimental value is a highly prevalent, yet largely understudied phenomenon. We introduce the construct of sentimental value and investigate how and why sentimental value influences hedonic adaptation. Across 7 studies, we examine the antecedents of sentimental value and demonstrate its effect on hedonic adaptation using both naturally occurring a...
Empirically analyzing empirical evidence
One of the central goals in any scientific endeavor is to understand causality. Experiments that seek to demonstrate a cause/effect relation most often manipulate the postulated causal factor. Aarts et al. describe the replication of 100 experiments reported in papers published in 2008 in three high-ranking...
Although people recover from satiation with the natural passage of time, we examine whether it is possible to influence the recovery process merely by changing the perceived temporal distance from past consumption. Experiment 1, a field experiment, demonstrates that influencing the perceived temporal distance from dinner-goers’ last meal affects th...
In an earlier article (Galak & Meyvis, 2011), we reported eight studies that demonstrate people's tendency to remember unpleasant experiences as more aversive when they think they will experience them again. Based on a test that, ironically, suffers from publication bias, Francis (2012) estimated that there is a high probability that we obtained at...
Reproducibility is a defining feature of science. However, because of strong incentives for innovation and weak incentives for confirmation, direct replication is rarely practiced or published. The Reproducibility Project is an open, large-scale, collaborative effort to systematically examine the rate and predictors of reproducibility in psychologi...
Across 7 experiments (N = 3,289), we replicate the procedure of Experiments 8 and 9 from Bem (2011), which had originally demonstrated retroactive facilitation of recall. We failed to replicate that finding. We further conduct a meta-analysis of all replication attempts of these experiments and find that the average effect size (d = 0.04) is no dif...
Although people recover from satiation with the natural passage of time, we examine whether it is possible to influence the recovery process by changing merely the subjective temporal distance from past consumption. Through a series of lab and field experiments, we find that merely influencing perceptions of subjective temporal distance affects con...
The traditional view of satiation is that repeated consumption produces an unavoidable decline in liking according to the quantity and recency of consumption. We challenge this deterministic view by showing that satiation is instead partially constructed in the moment based on contextual cues. More specifically, while satiation is a function of the...
Consumers often choose how quickly to consume things they enjoy. The research presented here demonstrates that they tend to consume too rapidly, growing tired of initially well-liked stimuli such as a favorite snack (experiments 1 and 4) or an enjoyable video game (experiments 2 and 3) more quickly than they would if they slowed consumption. The re...
Although most Americans agree that wealth inequality is a pressing problem, opposition to redistributive income policies remains high, particularly among conservatives. We explore the possibility that this opposition is influenced by how income inequality is discussed: as either the poor making less than the rich or the rich making more than the po...
Marketers distinguish between three types of media: paid (e.g., advertising), owned (e.g., company website), and earned (e.g., publicity). The effects of paid media on sales have been extensively covered in the marketing literature. The effects of earned media, however, have received limited attention. This paper examines how two types of earned me...
Is variety of the spice of life? The present research suggests that the answer depends on the rate of consumption. In three experiments, we find that, whereas a variety of stimuli is preferred to repetition of even a better-liked single stimulus when consumption is continuous, this preference reverses when the satiation associated with repetition i...
Across 7 laboratory studies and 1 field study, we demonstrated that people remembered an unpleasant experience as more aversive when they expected this experience to return than when they had no such expectation. Our results indicate that this effect results from people's tendency to brace for unpleasant experiences. Specifically, when faced with t...
Prosocial lending in the form of micro-financing, small uncollateralized loans to entrepreneurs in the developing world, has recently emerged as a leading contender as a cure for world poverty. Our research investigates, in a field setting with real world and consequential data, the characteristics of borrowers that engender lending. We observe tha...
We replicated the procedure of Experiment 8 from Bem (2010), which had originally demonstrated retroactive facilitation of recall. We failed to replicate the result. The paper includes a description of our procedure and analysis as well as a brief discussion for some reasons why we obtained a different result than in the original paper.
Instructors tell their students to write clearly. This prescription meshes with our intuition, wins confirmation in scores of books on writing, and finds empirical confirmation in research on perceptual fluency: People like content that is easy to process. Nevertheless, in some circumstances people expect content to be difficult, and ease might be...
Although researchers have documented many instances of crowd wisdom, it is important to know whether some kinds of judgments may lead the crowd astray, whether crowds’ judgments improve with feedback over time, and whether crowds’ judgments can be improved by changing the way judgments are elicited. We investigated these questions in a sports gambl...
Consumers frequently consume items to the point where they no longer enjoy them. In a pilot study and two experiments spanning three distinct classes of stimuli, we find that people can recover from this satiation by simply recalling the variety of alternative items they have consumed in the past. And yet, people seem to exhibit "variety amnesia" i...
Consumers prefer to watch television programs without commercials. Yet, in spite of most consumers’ extensive experience with watching television, we propose that commercial interruptions can actually improve the television‐viewing experience. Although consumers do not foresee it, their enjoyment diminishes over time. Commercial interruption...
The present research demonstrates that symbolic boundaries such as political borders act as psychological buffers. Across six experiments (N = 583) we demonstrate that consumers prefer to avoid crossing a town border to reach a store (experiments 1 and 2), even when no visual cues are provided (experiment 3). Furthermore, consumers feel safer when...
Self-image motives and "sacrosanct beliefs" are powerful motivators of consumer judgment and decision making. The sacrosanct belief that one is rational, for instance, can cause consumers to justify seemingly unwise economic decisions. This article outlines some of the occasions when self-image motives appear to fail. For instance, although consume...
Self‐image motives and “sacrosanct beliefs” are powerful motivators of consumer judgment and decision making. The sacrosanct belief that one is rational, for instance, can cause consumers to justify seemingly unwise economic decisions. This article outlines some of the occasions when self‐image motives appear to fail. For instance, although consume...
As is common for many men, Shakespeare was idealising a woman. The search for an ideal partner was not only critical for Shakespeare — it is, by evolutionary standards, the central goal for all male and female life forms (Buss, 1985;Darwin, 1859;Vandenberg, 1972). Anthropological and psychological evidence continues to document the features women s...
