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Publications (48)
Self-guided learning products such as online education and language learning apps are pervasive in today's consumer environment. We investigate how the congruence between one's implicit theory of personality and the type of feedback provided to consumers influences evaluations of these products. Relying on converging evidence from one quasi-field a...
The present research explores the effect of an ambient coffee-like scent (versus no scent) on expectations regarding performance on an analytical reasoning task as well as on actual performance. We show that people in a coffee-scented (versus unscented) environment perform better on an analytical reasoning task due to heightened performance expecta...
The peer review process--both writing reviews for academic journals and responding to reviews of one's own work--is fundamental to building scientific knowledge. In this article, we explain why you should invest time reviewing, how to write a constructive review, and how to respond effectively to reviews of your own work. © The Author 2016. Publish...
The authors present evidence that light-colored hedonic foods, that is, foods generally considered to be vices and relatively unhealthy, are consumed in greater quantity than the same foods that are darker in color. Greater consumption was demonstrated for lighter-colored chocolate candies and pudding (vs. darker) across a variety of colors. This h...
Alliteration is the repetition of initial word sounds across two or more proximal words. Alliterative pricing presentations consisting of words (brand or product names) and numbers (price and quantity information) can influence evaluations, choice, and purchase behavior. We provide evidence that alliterative pricing promotions can positively influe...
The present research examines how ambient scents affect consumers' spatial perceptions in retail environments, which in turn influence customers' feelings of power and, thus, product preference and purchasing behavior. Specifically, the authors demonstrate that in a warm- (vs. cool-) scented and thus perceptually more (vs. less) socially dense envi...
Consumers often encounter goods and services that provide cues to mark their progress. We define the term “goal progress cues” to reflect the diverse category of cues that highlight progress towards a goal. Across a series of three studies, we show that entity theorists, who rely on cues that highlight completion in order to signal their abilities...
Pharmaceutical non-adherence is a major issue in both the United States and worldwide. In fact, lack of medication adherence has been called “America’s other drug problem.” It is estimated that globally only about 50 % of patients take their medicines as prescribed, and in the United States the annual cost of poor adherence has been estimated to be...
Magical thinking refers to irrational peculiar beliefs, including those that conform to the laws of contagion. We propose that touching an object that was previously touched by a high performer increases confidence via magical thinking (ability contagion) and improves actual performance among individuals high in experiential processing. A series of...
Consumers frequently engage in self-gifting purchases (gifts for one’s self) and they do so mostly to reward themselves for a success achieved or to cheer themselves up after a failure. Thus, both ‘reward’ and ‘compensation’ motives might underlie consumers’ self-gift purchases. Although self-gifting has been increasingly popular in the marketing l...
We document the existence of an inference strategy based on a no-pain, no-gain lay theory, showing that consumers infer pharmaceutical products to be more efficacious when they are associated with a detrimental side effect or attribute. Study 1 finds that consumers high in need for cognition infer a bad-tasting cough syrup to be more effective than...
This article examines how imputed costs influence food consumption. Across one field study and three lab studies, the authors demonstrate that the greater the imputed cost of consumption, the greater is the likelihood of choosing a more indulgent, high-calorie food. Specifically, the authors show that when the imputed costs of payment are higher, s...
This research examines how credit card debt affects consumer spending. In five experimental and field studies, the authors demonstrate that outstanding credit card debt increases spending for consumers with high self-control. They also show that this effect can be eliminated by increasing the available credit on the credit card. Thus, when the avai...
Several recent lines of survey research demonstrate that the simple act of asking a question can lead to changes in a respondent's subsequent behavior. In the current research we asked college students their likelihood to either (i) exercise or (ii) use illegal drugs in the coming 2 months. After 2 months we asked the same college students to repor...
The authors propose a restructuring of the "food as health" paradigm to "food as well-being." This requires shifting from an emphasis on restraint and restrictions to a more positive, holistic understanding of the role of food in overall well-being. The authors propose the concept of food well-being (FWB), defined as a positive psychological, physi...
Irrational or illogical beliefs are referred to variously as magical thinking, peculiar beliefs, superstitious beliefs, and half-beliefs. We first distinguish the various terms according to their most common and relevant usage for consumer psychologists and define a conceptual structure for the roles of conscious and nonconscious processes associat...
Across a series of three studies, we demonstrate that the number of product units displayed on a package biases consumers' perceptions of product quantity (i.e., the number of snack items the package contains) and actual consumption. Specifically, we demonstrate that consumers use an anchoring heuristic to infer that packages that display a greater...
Consumers trying to watch or restrict what they eat face a battle each day as they attempt to navigate the food-rich environments in which they live. Due to the complexity of food decision making, consumers are susceptible to a wide range of social, cognitive, affective, and environmental forces determined to interrupt their intentions to restrict...
This research examines how consumers’ food choices differ when healthy items are included in a choice set compared with when they are not available. Results demonstrate that individuals are, ironically, more likely to make indulgent food choices when a healthy item is available compared to when it is not available. The influence of the healthy item...
This research focuses on a pervasive but largely unexamined product attribute-freshness date-to shed light on how and why its influence on the consumption of perishable products changes with product ownership. Drawing on recent research on the endowment effect, we demonstrate that even when the differential costs implicit in ownership are controlle...
With allegations of food contamination rapidly increasing, people face numerous consumption decisions regarding food safety. This paper examines the roles of cultural similarity and personal relevance in consumers' perceptions of the risk of food-borne contamination and their intentions to reduce consumption of this food. We demonstrate that consum...
We explore superstitious beliefs as a basis of product performance expectations and their impact on initial purchase likelihood
and subsequent satisfaction. In doing so, we demonstrate instances when superstition-driven expectations cause consumers to
make purchase decisions that run counter to economic rationality. In the first set of studies we f...
Despite the large impact that superstitious beliefs have on the marketplace, we currently know very little about their implications for consumer judgment and decision making. We document the existence of the influence of superstitious beliefs on consumer behavior and specify their conscious and nonconscious underlying properties. In particular, we...
In a commentary in the previous issue of Social Influence, Schneider, Tahk, and Krosnick raise concerns about the analytical techniques and conclusions drawn in Williams, Block, and Fitzsimons (20066.
Williams , P. , Block , L. G. and Fitzsimons , G. J. 2006 . Simply asking questions about health behaviors increases both healthy and unhealthy behav...
Objective:
Increasing serving sizes have been identified as contributors to the obesity epidemic. Researchers suggest that consumers are in need of cues that provide norms for the appropriate amount of food to consume. The impact of one potential cue, the provision of nutritional information for a single serving as well as the entire package ("dua...
No-prescription Web sites are online pharmacies that supply controlled substances without a valid prescription. The authors present a comprehensive investigation and content analysis of no-prescription Web sites, including a review of the legal environment, an in-depth critique of policy and interventions, and suggestions to help monitor and shut d...
patient has just left her physician's office after a rou- tine annual exam, during which she is given a clean bill of health. Feeling good, and possibly relieved, she vows to follow her doctor's recommendation: exercise at least 30 minutes three times a week and get 1200-1500 mil- ligrams of calcium every day. Determined to begin right away, she go...
Researchers have consistently shown that questioning people about a future behavior influences the subsequent performance of that behavior. Since its first demonstration by Sherman (1980), two groups of researchers have built parallel streams of research investigating the self‐prophecy and mere‐measurement phenomenon. Both sets of scholars have cle...
In their article, Shiv, Carmon, and Ariely (2005, here-inafter SCA) document for the first time that nonconscious expectations about the relationship between price and qual-ity can influence consumers in a placebo-like manner. Even when the price paid for a good has absolutely no relation-ship to its actual quality, consumers' nonconscious beliefs...
Results from 2 studies on advertising to reduce the incidence of drinking and driving show that the effect of self- vs. other-referencing on the persuasiveness of fear and guilt appeals is moderated by definitions of the self (independent vs. interdependent self-construals). For people who hold a predominantly independent self-construal, superiorit...
We demonstrate that the mere-measurement effect occurs because asking an intention question is not perceived as a persuasion attempt. In experiments 1 and 2, we show that when persuasive intent is attributed to an intention question, consumers adjust their behavior as long as they have sufficient cognitive capacity to permit conscious correction. I...
This paper examines whether a national anti-drug advertising campaign is associated with a change in adolescents' drug use behavior. Specifically, the primary objective of the paper is to investigate the relationship between adolescents' recall of exposure to anti-drug advertising and their probability of trying marijuana, cocaine and crack, as wel...
This study examined whether adolescents' recall of antidrug advertising is associated with a decreased probability of using illicit drugs and, given drug use, a reduced volume of use.
A behavioral economic model of influences on drug consumption was developed with survey data from a nationally representative sample of adolescents to determine the i...
Window displays are an ubiquitous and prominent but under-researched element of retail strategy. This paper explores how the store and product category information communicated by a store's windows are related to consumers’ shopping decisions, such as store entry and product purchase, and how these relationships vary for consumer segments that diff...
One of the greatest challenges in advertising health-related information is over- coming the target audiences' self-positivity bias (i.e., the tendency for people to believe that they are invulnerable to disease). In this article, we show that the self-positivity bias hinders message processing, and we demonstrate that mes- sage cues can reduce thi...
Health messages advocating behavioral change are directed at those who are at risk of incurring adverse consequences. However, previous studies have found that people process personally relevant health messages in a biased, defensive manner, leading to decreased persuasion. This paper examines the role of elaboration as a mechanism to encourage les...
We explore the use of shopping lists as an external memory aid to consumers’ grocery shopping by examining the factors that influence the content of consumers’ shopping lists and the effectiveness of shopping lists as external memory aids. We analyze the shopping lists and actual purchase behavior of a panel of consumers during multiple grocery sho...
This study provides evidence for motivated reasoning when participants' prior intentions are incompatible with stimulus messages. Two types of dissonance that result from incompatible goals are identified: affect-based dissonance (dissonance accompanied with negative emotions) and cognition-based dissonance (dissonance accompanied with disagreement...
We develop an integrated theory of health communication by combining protection motivation theory (PMT; Rogers, 1983) with the stages of change described in the transtheoretical model (Prochaska & DClemente, 1982). Our study challenges the assumption implicit in PMT that perceptions of vulnerability, severity, response efficacy, and self-efficacy a...
The theme of personal appearance and its relation to consumer behavior in the culture of consumption plays a major role in our popular arts and entertainment. On this theme, the authors begin with a general consideration of the role played by physical attractiveness in interpersonal relations. They next develop a typology to suggest a framework tha...
We use the literature on self-efficacy and vividness to predict and explain the conditions under which vivid information will be more persuasive than nonvivid information in a health communication. Our results on sexually transmitted diseases (Experiment 1) and skin cancer (Experiment 2) demonstrate higher preferences for vivid over nonvivid materi...
The authors present a resource-matching perspective to explain the relationship between vividness and persuasion. Three experiments confirm the predicted inverted-U relationship between resource allocation and persuasion for vivid information, and a positive linear relationship between resource allocation and persuasion for nonvivid information whe...
We investigate the conditions under which messages that prompt low and high levels of fear are likely to be effective. Our premise is that when a low level of fear is ineffective, it is because there is insufficient elaboration of the harmful consequences of engaging in the destructive behavior. By contrast, when appeals arousing high levels of fea...
The authors explore the relationship between perceived efficacy, depth of processing, and message framing. They conduct two experiments on varying health-related issues: sexually transmitted disease and skin cancer. In both studies, the authors demonstrate that a low efficacy condition (i.e., when it is uncertain that following the recommendations...
The authors explore the relationship between perceived efficacy, depth of processing, and message framing. They conduct two experiments on varying health-related issues: sexually transmitted disease and skin cancer. In both studies, the authors demonstrate that a low efficacy condition (i.e., when it is uncertain that following the recommendations...
