Liat Levontin

• PhD
• Professor (Associate) at Technion – Israel Institute of Technology

Unscrupulous advertisers may try to increase attention to search ads by using offensive ads, which can increase attention and recall to the detriment of individuals and society. Here we investigate whether offensive ads, when shown to search engine users, have such effects. We developed 12 search scenarios and created 4 versions of the search resul...

Purpose This paper aims to draw on values theory, associative network theory and schema congruity theory to examine how consumers attribute human-like values to product categories and products, and how these attributions affect product evaluations. Design/methodology/approach Study 1 randomly assigned 925 respondents to one of three product catego...

The term “100%” represents perfection. Thus, it is not surprising that marketers believe that claims that contain this term (e.g., “100% organic”) can make products more appealing. This intuition is reflected in the extensive use of 100% claims to describe products' qualities. We discuss how the term 100% can be used to create a claim about perfect...

We present a Compound Poisson Mixture Regression model of the joint distribution of transaction frequency and monetary value, and apply it to study alumni donations at a university in the USA. The model captures covariate effects, recognizing that both response variables emanate from one statistical unit — a donor. Heterogeneity, group-level factor...

Understanding volunteers’ motivations to participate in Citizen Science (CS) projects is essential for these projects’ effective management and success. Many studies have investigated citizen scientists’ motivations, but only a few have used a theory-based approach to provide a standardized methodology to measure CS motivations. The current researc...

A wealth of research documents the critical role of trust for social exchange and cooperative behavior. The ability to inspire trust in others can often be elusive, and distrust can have adverse interpersonal and ethical consequences. Drawing from the literature on social hierarchy and interpersonal judgments, the current research explores the pred...

Many charitable organizations offer potential donors the option to choose their donation recipients—suggesting that organizations perceive the availability of such choice as beneficial to donation raising. Building upon research on choice aversion in the context of consumer goods and on the identifiable victim effect in the context of donation‐givi...

The increasing alienation of people from nature is profoundly concerning because people's interactions with nature affect well‐being, affinity for nature, and support of biodiversity conservation. Efforts to restore or enhance people's interactions with nature are, therefore, important to ensure sustainable human and wildlife communities, but littl...

Prosocial behaviors can be autonomy-oriented, providing recipients with the means to succeed in future situations but not supplying an immediate solution, or they can be dependency-oriented, providing an immediate solution but not supplying tools for future success. Thus far, consumer research on prosocial behavior has devoted little attention to t...

Values are broad motivations that can serve as the basis for goals. We propose that values can be used to understand the motivational basis of amity goal orientation, a prosocial goal orientation within achievement situations. We offer theory and empirical evidence relating personal values to amity goal orientation and other achievement goal orient...

Research has neglected the utility of pro-social goals within achievement situations. In this article, four studies demonstrate that amity goal orientation, promoting mutual success of oneself together with others, enhances the utility of mastery goal orientation. We demonstrate this in longitudinally predicting performance (Studies 1 and 2) and in...

In this paper, we suggest people use anonymous online forums as platforms for self-disclosing actions they feel guilty about—such as transgressions and unethical behaviors—with the goal of achieving guilt relief through others’ reactions. We support this proposition by analyzing field data extracted from Yahoo Answers, an online question-and-answer...

No one likes feeling empty. When people feel empty they seek replenishment, which usually takes the form of increased self-focused behaviors that provide value to the self and decreased other-focused behaviors that provide value to others. This research demonstrates how exposure to the concept of emptiness by simply performing or observing acts of...

Attributing the negative behavior of an adversary to underlying dispositions inflames negative attitudes. In two studies, by manipulating both implicit theories and attributions, we show that the negative impact of dispositional attributions can be reduced. Both studies showed that inducing an incremental theory (“traits are malleable”) in Israelis...

Past research has shown repeatedly that people prefer donating to a single identified human victim rather than to unidentified or abstract donation targets. In the current research we show results countering the identifiable victim effect, wherein people prefer to donate to charitable organizations rather than to an identifiable victim. In a series...