Jill Sundie

Washington & Lee University | W&L · Williams School of Commerce, Economics, and Politics

Frugal individuals are known as restrained and disciplined spenders but also exhibit strong deal-seeking tendencies. The unexpected presentation of a deep discount brings these facets of frugality into apparent conflict. How might frugal consumers resolve this conflict? Qualitative analysis of interviews with frugal consumers (study 1) led us to fo...

The fields of business span diverse content areas including accounting, analytics, economics, entrepreneurship, finance, information technology, leadership, logistics, negotiation, sales, strategic management and marketing, and the more behavioral wings of the disciplines of those respective areas such as consumer behavior and behavioral accounting...

This special issue includes state-of-the-art papers that leverage various theories from evolutionary psychology (EP) to shed light on important consumption-related phenomena. Our guest editorial provides an overview of this EP-based consumer research, highlighting the key content, common denominators, and significant strengths of the articles. The...

Four studies provide evidence for a process by which a woman's conspicuous consumption can serve as a deterrent to affiliative behaviors by materialistic men, via heightened perceptions of the woman's financial standards for a romantic partner. Materialistic men report utilizing status and resources to attract women more than non-materialistic men....

Replication research holds an increasingly important place in modern psychological science. If such work is to improve the state of knowledge rather than add confusion, however, replication attempts must be held to high standards of rigor. As an example of how replication attempts can add confusion rather than clarity, we consider an article by Sha...

Despite mounting support documenting the long-term benefits of consuming experiences versus material possessions, some consumers appear to reject the ‘experiential recommendation.’ Applying a life history theory perspective, we conducted seven studies to examine how unpredictability and harshness during childhood may translate into a decreased prop...

When researchers are interested in capturing perceived discrepancies--for example, the perceived alignment between organizational and business-unit strategies, or the perceived gap between expected and received service delivery--many different measurement approaches are available. This paper presents a psychometric analysis of the various measures...

[Correction Notice: An Erratum for this article was reported in Vol 2(2) of Psychology of Popular Media Culture (see record 2013-13053-003). Figure 1 was labeled and scaled incorrectly. The correct Figure 1 is presented in the erratum. All versions of this article have been corrected.] This study investigated the persuasive impact of information pr...

Reports an error in "The Opinion-Changing Power of Computer-Based Multimedia Presentations" by Rosanna E. Guadagno, Nicole L. Muscanell, Jill M. Sundie, Terrilee A. Hardison and Robert B. Cialdini (Psychology of Popular Media Culture, Advanced Online Publication, Mar 11, 2013, np). Figure 1 was labeled and scaled incorrectly. The correct Figure 1 i...

Reviews the book, The Archaeology of Mind: Neuroevolutionary Origins of Human Emotions by Jaak Panksepp and Lucy Biven (see record 2012-02256-000 ). In the reviewers' opinions, the authors of this book present a convincing case that the neurobiological foundations of affect in humans and mammals (as well as in some other creatures) are highly simil...

Consumer psychologists have devoted a great deal of research to understanding human social influence processes. Research on social influence could be enriched by incorporating several evolutionary principles, and viewing social influence processes through an adaptationist lens. Our central argument is that different social relationships are associa...

This study investigated the persuasive impact of information using varying degrees of technological sophistication. Participants were individuals who were novices and experts in the domain of the information. Participants reviewed a presentation of a football scout's favorable report on a potential recruit. They then evaluated the recruit's project...

Although current conceptualizations of materialism have yielded very valuable insights, each seems to be narrowly restricted to its own research purposes. In this article, we offer an expanded view of materialism that stresses the functions of materialistic goal pursuit, the processes by which these functions are developed and implemented, and thei...

Conspicuous consumption is a form of economic behavior in which self-presentational concerns override desires to obtain goods at bargain prices. Showy spending may be a social signal directed at potential mates. We investigated such signals by examining (a) which individuals send them, (b) which contexts trigger them, and (c) how observers interpre...

What is a "rational" decision? Economists traditionally viewed rationality as maximizing expected satisfaction. This view has been useful in modeling basic microeconomic concepts, but falls short in accounting for many everyday human decisions. It leaves unanswered why some things reliably make people more satisfied than others, and why people freq...

How do arousal-inducing contexts, such as frightening or romantic television programs, influence the effectiveness of basic persuasion heuristics? Different predictions are made by three theoretical models: A general arousal model predicts that arousal should increase effectiveness of heuristics; an affective valence model predicts that effectivene...

Emotional antecedents of schadenfreude—joy experienced when observing another's downfall—were investigated in a status consumption context. Across 3 studies, status product failure produced schadenfreude and led to intentions to spread negative word-of-mouth (studies 1, 2), and increased negative affect and overall negative attitudes toward the sta...

Religiosity, especially religious fundamentalism, is often assumed to have an inherent connection with conservative politics. This article proposes that the relationship varies by race in the United States. In Study 1, race moderated the relationships between religiosity indicators and political alignment in a nationally representative sample. In S...

When a Senate committee considered regulating access to a popular National Football League (NFL) broadcast in 2007, the context was familiar to marketers: accusations of abusing monopoly power. The specific issue of NFL telecasts was eventually resolved outside the public policy arena, but it raises a more general question: What "monopolies" should...

Reviews the book, The Evolutionary Bases of Consumption by Gad Saad (see record 2007-05810-000 ). Why hasn't the field of consumer psychology leveraged this theoretical powerhouse to the same extent? Saad's book is aimed at reconciling this omission by suggesting that there is broad applicability of Darwinian principles to the study of consumer beh...

Conspicuous displays of consumption and benevolence might serve as "costly signals" of desirable mate qualities. If so, they should vary strategically with manipulations of mating-related motives. The authors examined this possibility in 4 experiments. Inducing mating goals in men increased their willingness to spend on conspicuous luxuries but not...

Diverse cultural norms governing economic behavior might emerge from a dynamic interaction of universal but flexible predispositions that get calibrated to biologically meaningful features of the local social and physical ecology. This impressive cross-cultural effort could better elucidate such gene-culture interactions by incorporating theory-dri...

Review of Hocutt's Groounded Ethics by Seminar Class

In 3 studies, the authors searched for nonlinearities as possible clues to context-sensitive mechanisms involved in mating decisions. Participants judged targets' sexual desirability, marital desirability, or social status on the basis of information about income or number of past sexual partners. Because one cannot know in advance where nonlineari...

In this chapter, we review basic evolutionary concepts, such as sexual selection and parental investment, focusing on how those concepts have been applied to understanding sometimes puzzling sex differences and similarities. We then consider how these concepts reflect on several behavioral consistencies across human cultures, as well as several cro...

Evidence-based medicine is a new selling-point for HMOs whose physicians maintain currency with the literature, integrate the latest validated technical advances into their practice, and select therapies based on published meta-analyses of clinical trials. "My god of course" you think as you watch the commercial, ". . . should go without saying." B...