L. J. Shrum

HEC Paris | HEC · Marketing

Purpose Studies have shown that within-domain compensatory consumption can successfully repair the damaged self, but other research indicates that it can undermine self-control because such consumption causes self-threat rumination that impairs self-regulatory resources. This paper aims to identify a boundary condition that reconciles and explains...

Consumers frequently encounter disgusting images and disgust has been shown to produce a variety of behavioral responses when used in the context of advertisements or public service announcements. Building on theories of emotional appraisal and decision-making, we examine how physical and moral disgust differentially affect consumers’ identity and...

The negative association between materialism and life satisfaction is well‐documented, but it is unclear what the directionality of the association is. To address this issue, we (a) conducted a three‐wave longitudinal study ( N = 6551) over 3 years and examined the bidirectional relations between life satisfaction and materialism as a composite mea...

Consumer surveys are integral to marketers' understanding of consumers' judgments, preferences, and choices. However, consumers often respond in socially desirable ways, making it difficult to accurately ascertain their true preferences and reactions. In this regard, research has produced conflicting findings on who engages more in socially desirab...

Loneliness is a complex set of aversive feelings that arises when people perceive that their belongingness needs are not being met. Usually, these feelings of loneliness are temporary because people successfully cope with their loneliness by connecting with others. However, for some people, their attempts to cope with loneliness are unsuccessful, a...

Although luxury firms have come under increasing pressure to engage in corporate social responsibility (CSR) initiatives, they have traditionally been hesitant to engage because of the CSR–luxury paradox: the values and motivations underlying luxury consumption (self-enhancement) may conflict with the values and motivations underlying prosocial beh...

Across four experiments, we show that materialists' willingness to engage in cause‐related marketing (CRM) depends on the type of campaign: product‐linked (brand linked to a cause through limited‐edition products) or donation‐linked (direct donations to a charitable cause). Materialists are more willing to engage in product‐linked than donation‐lin...

Body Mass Indices and obesity rates are increasing worldwide, and one way to reduce caloric intake is to reduce portion size choice. In this research, the authors develop a behavioral intervention aimed at reducing portion size choices in the context of online food ordering. In eight experiments (including a field experiment), the authors show that...

When English speakers anthropomorphize animals or objects, they refer to such entities using human pronouns (e.g., he or she instead of it). Unlike English, which marks gender only for humans, gendered languages such as French grammatically mark gender not only for humans but also for nonhumans. Research has shown that in gendered languages, althou...

This review synthesizes the most recent advances in psychology investigating the link between loneliness and consumption. We structure the review around the motives that loneliness activates, based on the Evolutionary Theory of Loneliness. More specifically, we detail how consumers use consumption experiences to repair perceived deficiencies in the...

Materialism has a long history in consumer research, and the volume of research continues to expand rapidly. In this article, we review extant research on materialism, with a particular focus on research in the last 10 years. We structure the review around the antecedents and consequences of materialism. We first provide a brief review of the diffe...

This article is part of a Research Dialogue: Goya‐Tocchetto & Payne (2022): https://doi.org/10.1002/jcpy.1277 Hagerty et al. (2022): https://doi.org/10.1002/jcpy.1275 Ordabayeva & Lisjak (2022): https://doi.org/10.1002/jcpy.1276

Research has shown that television viewing cultivates a materialistic worldview in children. However, other socialization factors may also influence children’s materialism. The current research tests two socialization pathways of parental influence: (a) an indirect path in which parents pass on their own materialism to their children, and the paren...

Gendered languages assign masculine and feminine grammatical gender to all nouns, including nonhuman entities. In French and Spanish, the name of the disease resulting from the virus (COVID‐19) is grammatically feminine, whereas the virus that causes the disease (coronavirus) is masculine. In this research, we test whether the grammatical gender ma...

The current COVID-19 pandemic has had obvious, well-documented devastating effects on people's physical health. In this research, we investigate its potential effects on people's mental health. Many people have experienced social isolation, as countries attempt to stem the spread of the disease through confinement and other forms of social distanci...

A brand name’s linguistic characteristics convey brand qualities independent of the name’s denotative meaning. For instance, name length, sounds, and stress can signal masculine or feminine associations. This research examines the effects of such gender associations on three important brand outcomes: attitudes, choice, and performance. Across six s...

In the absence of an effective vaccine or treatment, the current best defence against COVID-19 is social distancing – staying at home as much as possible, keeping distance from others, and avoiding large gatherings. Although social distancing improves physical health in terms of helping to reduce viral transmission, its psychological consequences a...

Gendered languages assign masculine and feminine grammatical gender to all nouns, including nonhuman entities. In French, Italian, and Spanish, the name of the disease resulting from the virus (COVID-19) is grammatically feminine, whereas the virus that causes the disease (coronavirus) is masculine. In this research, we test whether the grammatical...

Consumers often anthropomorphize non-human entities. In this research, we investigate a novel antecedent of anthropomorphism: language. Some languages (e.g., English) make a grammatical distinction between humans (he, she) and non-humans (it), whereas other languages (e.g., French) do not (all objects are gender-marked). We propose that such gramma...

Crossmodal sensory correspondences between shape and taste are well-established (e.g., angular–bitter, rounded–sweet). However, the extent to which these correspondences reliably influence consumer taste judgments is less clear, as are the processes underlying the effects. This research addresses both issues. Across seven experiments, we show that...

Adults view past experiences as making them happier than material goods, yet products and brands are highly coveted by children, even at young ages. Using a child developmental framework, we reconcile these two perspectives. Across four studies with children and adolescents of ages 3–17 years, we show that children (ages 3–12) derive more happiness...

In the absence of an effective vaccine or treatment, the current best defence against COVID-19 is social distancing—staying at home as much as possible, keeping distance from others, and avoiding large gatherings. Although social distancing maximizes physical health, we know little about its psychological consequences. In this research (N = 374), w...

When people experience threats to important aspects of their self-concept (e.g., power, intelligence, sociability), they often compensate by consuming products that symbolize success, mastery, or competence on the threatened self-domain (within-domain compensatory consumption). Our research examines whether such compensatory consumption is effectiv...

Engaging in unethical consumption behaviors is an acute societal problem that can have severe consequences for adolescents, and businesses in particular have been accused of making such consumption particularly appealing and accessible. However, the causes of unethical behaviors are not well understood and research on the causes has been mixed. In...

What causes adolescents to develop consumer’ ethical beliefs? Prior research has largely focused on the negative influence of peers and negative patterns of parent–child interactions to explain risky and unethical consumer behaviors. We take a different perspective by focusing on the positive support of parents and peers in adolescent social develo...

People—be they politicians, marketers, job candidates, product reviewers, bloggers, or romantic interests—often use linguistic devices to persuade others, and there is a sizeable literature that has documented the effects of numerous linguistic devices. However, understanding the implications of these effects is difficult without an organizing fram...

Marketers want to communicate with consumers for a variety of reasons, ranging from increasing brand awareness to persuading people to purchase products or services. In doing so, marketers have multiple means of communicating and persuading. For example, they may use emotional appeals, rational appeals, visual appeals, and so forth, which differ in...

This entry provides a comprehensive review of cultivation research to date. It discusses the initial tests and criticisms of early cultivation theory and research. It also details attempts to explain the processes that underlie cultivation effects at the individual level and the current state of research on the psychological processes underlying cu...

Previous research suggests that when social exclusion is communicated in an explicit manner, consumers express preferences for helping, whereas when it is communicated in an implicit manner, they express preferences for conspicuous consumption. However, this may not always hold true. In the present research, we put forward a theoretical framework e...

The global teen market has significant spending power and is an important factor in the world economy. However, little is known about the social motivations underlying attitudes toward luxury fashion brands during adolescence. This research investigates the social mechanisms underlying teenage attitudes toward luxury fashion brands in a cross-cultu...

Perception refers to the process of categorizing and interpreting information that is attended to (→ Perception). Selective perception refers to the process of categorizing and interpreting information in a way that favors one category or interpretation over another. Thus, selective perception is generally considered to represent a bias in → inform...

Perception is an ambiguous term and is used in many different ways, at least in the field of communication. Perhaps this is understandable given that communication is a diverse field that draws on concepts from a number of disciplines. Thus, in reading communication literature, one might encounter terms such as precept, perceptual field, or percept...

Disgust has been shown to produce diverse behavioral responses. We examine how different disgust typologies affect consumers' identity and compensatory consumption.

Materialism has a generally held connotation that is associated with character deficiencies, self-centeredness, and unhappiness, and most extant research views materialism as having a negative influence on well-being. In this article, we review and synthesise research that supports both positive and negative outcomes of behaviours associated with m...

The impact of media communications on attitude formation and change clearly depends on how the messages are comprehended. Although the role of comprehension processes in communication and persuasion has a long history in social psychology (cf. Hovland, Janis, & Kelley, 1953; McGuire, 1964, 1968, 1972; Wyer, 1974), it has received little attention i...

Public policies are typically established to eliminate important social problems (e.g., minority discrimination, crime, poverty). In addition, the importance of these problems, and urgency people feel about addressing them, is influenced by perceptions of their prevalence. These perceptions, however, can be unwittingly biased by extraneous sources...

Social exclusion has been shown to produce a number of different responses. This research examines the proposition that social exclusion may produce either self-focused or prosocial responses, depending on which needs are threatened. Different types of social exclusion threaten different needs, which in turn produce distinct outcomes (differential...

Selecting good brand names for products is a critical step for marketers, and many aspects of a brand name influence brand perceptions. Three experiments investigated the effects of phonetic symbolism (the impact of sound on meaning) on brand name preference, the extent to which these effects generalize to other languages, and the processes that un...

Two studies investigated the interrelations among television viewing, materialism, and life satisfaction, and their underlying processes. Study 1 tested an online process model for television's cultivation of materialism by manipulating level of materialistic content. Viewing level influenced materialism, but only among participants who reported be...

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...

Although interactivity is often considered to have a positive infl uence on persuasion, research on interactiv- ity effects is actually very mixed. This paper argues that under certain circumstances, interactivity may either enhance or inhibit persuasion. A dual-process model of interactivity effects is proposed and tested that posits differential...

Three studies investigated the relations between cultural values and socially desirable responding, the processes that underlie them, and factors that influence the strength of the relations. Results indicated that individualism was associated with self-deceptive enhancement but not impression management, whereas collectivism was associated with im...

Three studies investigated the impact of self-construal on impulsive consumption. Independents exhibited more impulsive consumption tendencies than did interdependents. A chronically accessible independent self-construal was positively associated with country-level beer consumption (study 1a) and state-level problem alcohol consumption (study 1b)....

Three studies investigated the impact of self-construal on impulsive consumption. Independents exhibited more impulsive consumption tendencies than did interdependents. A chronically accessible independent self-construal was positively associated with country-level beer consumption (study 1a) and state-level problem alcohol consumption (study 1b)....

Perception refers to the process of categorizing and interpreting information that is attended to (→ Perception). Selective perception refers to the process of categorizing and interpreting information in a way that favors one category or interpretation over another. Thus, selective perception is generally considered to represent a bias in → inform...

Because of the extensive penetration of media into society, and the different purposes and types of information conveyed, there are a number of possible media effects. For the sake of simplicity, these possible media purposes are categorized as those intended to persuade (e.g., → advertising, → propaganda), inform (e.g., → news), or entertain (e.g....

Two experiments investigated the effects of phonetic symbolism on brand name preference. Participants indicated preference for fictitious brand names for particular products (or for products with particular attributes) from word pairs that differed only on vowel sound (e.g., front vs. back vowels, or vowel sounds associated with positive vs. negati...

Consumers' judgments of the frequency with which members of an ethnic minority are represented in advertisements can depend on the processing strategies they employ both at the time the ads are first encountered and at the time the judgments are reported. These strategies, in turn, can depend on whether the consumers personally belong to the minori...

The magnitude of the cultivation effect for perceptual estimates of social reality has been shown to be affected by a number of contextual factors such as source priming and motivation to process information during judgment construction, and these contextual factors have been linked to the use of heuristic processing strategies when constructing ju...

Das Ausmaß des Kultivierungseffekts auf die wahrgenommene Einschätzung sozialer Realität wird von verschiedensten Kontextvariablen beeinflusst, so z.B. Priming durch die Bezugsquelle und die Motivation, Informationen während der Beurteilungskonstruktion zu verarbeiten. Diese kontextuellen Faktoren wurden mit dem Gebrauch von heuristischen Verarbeit...

Resumen Se ha demostrado que la magnitud del efecto de cultivación en las estimaciones perceptuales de la realidad social está conectada con numerosos factores contextuales como por ejemplo, la fuente principal de noticias y la motivación para procesar información durante el proceso de construcción de juicio/opinión. Estos factores contextuales han...

Perception is an ambiguous term and is used in many different ways, at least in the field of communication. Perhaps this is understandable given that communication is a diverse field that draws on concepts from a number of disciplines. Thus, in reading communication literature, one might encounter terms such as precept, perceptual field, or percept...

Prior research has shown that television viewing cultivates perceptions of the prevalence of societal affluence through a memory-based process that relies on the application of judgmental heuristics. This article extends this research by examining (1) whether cultivation effects generalize to consumer values such as materialism and (2) whether thes...

Styles brings together leading authorities from both academia and the marketing industry to provide a comprehensive overview and analysis of the rapidly changing world of marketing communication in the 21st Century. Containing a broad tableau of perspectives, the book reflects the insights and experiences of academics and practitioners from both si...