Baba Shiv’s research while affiliated with Stanford University and other places

The growth of the internet has spawned new “attention markets,” in which people devote increasing amounts of time to consuming online content, but the neurobehavioral mechanisms that drive engagement in these markets have yet to be elucidated. We used functional MRI (FMRI) to examine whether individuals’ neural responses to videos could predict their choices to start and stop watching videos as well as whether group brain activity could forecast aggregate video view frequency and duration out of sample on the internet (i.e., on youtube.com ). Brain activity during video onset predicted individual choice in several regions (i.e., increased activity in the nucleus accumbens [NAcc] and medial prefrontal cortex [MPFC] as well as decreased activity in the anterior insula [AIns]). Group activity during video onset in only a subset of these regions, however, forecasted both aggregate view frequency and duration (i.e., increased NAcc and decreased AIns)—and did so above and beyond conventional measures. These findings extend neuroforecasting theory and tools by revealing that activity in brain regions implicated in anticipatory affect at the onset of video viewing (but not initial choice) can forecast time allocation out of sample in an internet attention market.

Human beings revel in social approval and social connection. For example, individuals want to be liked, and frequently surround themselves with people who provide such positive reinforcement. Past work highlights a “common currency” between social rewards like social approval, and non-social rewards like money. But social and motivational contexts can reshape reward experiences considerably. Here, we examine the boundary conditions that deem social approval subjectively valuable. Participants received feedback about their attractiveness from others. Neural activity in reward-related brain structures (e.g., ventral striatum) increased in response to positive feedback, but only when such feedback came from well-liked targets. These heightened reward responses predicted increases in subsequent attraction to well-liked targets. This work suggests that motivational contexts amplify or diminish the value of social approval in a target-specific manner. The value of social approval is thus defined by the extent to which these experiences bring us closer to people we like.

Previous research has shown that material goods can help people self-express, either because the products are themselves self-expressive (e.g., a band T-shirt) or because the products are associated with a desired group. This article examines a new signal of self-expressiveness: whether the product is polarizing-that is, whether some people strongly like the product and other people strongly dislike the product. Eight studies examine how polarization and its associated indicator in the online domain (a bimodal distribution of user star ratings) affects consumer preferences. The results indicate that polarizing products are perceived to be more selfexpressive and to serve as stronger indicators of one's tastes and personality. As a result, people find products with bimodal rating distributions to be more desirable when they experience temporary or chronic low self-concept clarity. Further, people evaluate products with bimodal distributions more favorably in consumption contexts in which self-expression is important. These effects emerge when the bimodal distribution pertains to a self-expressive attribute (e.g., style) but not when it pertains to a non-self-expressive attribute (e.g., quality). Last, the effect is especially strong when people have the motivation to express an individual- rather than group-level identity. Hence, polarizing products are seen as vehicles for individual self-expression.

Making mistakes or failing at tasks is a common occurrence in human life. People can respond to and cope with failure in many ways. In this research, we examine potential advantages of relatively emotional (versus cognitive) responses to failure. In particular, we study how effort and time spent in subsequent tasks depend on whether people predominantly focus on their emotions or their cognitions as they respond to a failure. We demonstrate that, left to their own means, people's cognitions upon a failure are mainly justificatory in nature and thus do not automatically have the commonly believed reflective, self-improving qualities. We further argue and demonstrate that a relative focus on cognitions following a failure can prevent improvement in subsequent episodes, but a focus on emotions can allow for learning and, therefore, increased effort. Copyright

Understanding how human populations naturally respond to and cope with risk is important for fields ranging from psychology to public health. We used geophysical and individual-level mobile-phone data (mobile-apps, telecommunications, and Web usage) of 157,358 victims of the 2013 Ya’an earthquake to diagnose the effects of the disaster and investigate how experiencing real risk (at different levels of intensity) changes behavior. Rather than limiting human activity, higher earthquake intensity resulted in graded increases in usage of communications apps (e.g., social networking, messaging), functional apps (e.g., informational tools), and hedonic apps (e.g., music, videos, games). Combining mobile data with a field survey (N = 2,000) completed 1 week after the earthquake, we use an instrumental-variable approach to show that only increases in hedonic behavior reduced perceived risk. Thus, hedonic behavior could potentially serve as a population-scale coping and recovery strategy that is often missing in risk management and policy considerations.

This research explores how the experience of a jilt—the anticipation and subsequent inaccessibility of a highly desirable, aspirant option—influences preference for incumbent and non-incumbent options. We conceptualize jilting as a multi-stage process, which consists of a pre-jilt anticipatory phase that is initiated upon the introduction of an aspirant option and a post-jilt phase that is initiated when the aspirant option becomes inaccessible. We show that during the anticipatory phase, a process of denigration specific to the incumbent option is engendered. The subsequent jilt elicits a negative emotional response. During the affectively-charged post-jilt phase, preference shifts away from the now-denigrated incumbent option, yielding a jilting effect. In four field and laboratory studies, we establish this jilting effect, rule out alternative accounts, and discuss the theoretical and managerial implications of our findings.

Conventional wisdom and studies of unconscious processing suggest that sleeping on a choice may improve decision making. Although sleep has been shown to benefit several cognitive tasks, including problem solving, its impact on everyday choices remains unclear. Here we explore the effects of 'sleeping on it' on preference-based decisions among multiple options. In two studies, individuals viewed several attributes describing a set of items and were asked to select their preferred item after a 12-hour interval that either contained sleep or was spent fully awake. After an overnight period including sleep, individuals showed increases in positive perceptions of the choice set. This finding contrasts with previous research showing that sleep selectively enhances recall for negative information. In addition, this increase in positive recall did not translate into a greater desire to purchase their preferred item or into an overall benefit for choice satisfaction. Time-of-day controls were used to confirm that the observed effects could not be explained by circadian influences. Thus, we show that people may feel more positive about the choice options but not more confident about the choice after 'sleeping on' a subjective decision. We discuss how the valence of recalled choice set information may be important in understanding the effects of sleep on multi-attribute decision making and suggest several avenues for future research.

Price is a key factor in most purchases, but it can be presented at different stages of decision making. The authors examine the sequence-dependent effects of price and product information on the decisionmaking process at both neural and behavioral levels. During functional magnetic resonance imaging, the price of a product was shown to participants either before or after the product itself was presented. Early exposure to price, or "price primacy," altered the process of valuation, as observed in altered patterns of activity in the medial prefrontal cortex immediately before making a purchase decision. Specifically, whereas viewing products first resulted in evaluations strongly related to products' attractiveness or desirability, viewing prices first appeared to promote overall evaluations related to products' monetary worth. Consistent with this framework, the authors show that price primacy can increase purchase of bargain-priced products when their worth is easily recognized. Together, these results suggest that price primacy highlights considerations of product worth and can thereby influence purchasing.

Consumer choice is often based on the relative visual appeal of competing products. Lay intuition, common marketing practice, and extant literature all suggest that more visual impressions help consumers distinguish products. This research shows that the opposite can occur. Rather than highlighting differences, seeing more pictures of products being compared can obfuscate perceptions, reduce distinctiveness and attractiveness of products, and increase choice uncertainty. Six experiments demonstrate that this “product-agnosia” effect is driven by shifts in the perceptual focus level of visual information processing. More visual impressions increased component-oriented and decreased gestalt-oriented perceptual focus, which undermined the distinctiveness of products distinguished on a gestalt level (e.g., by style). The effect reversed for products distinguished on a component level (e.g., by technical features). Overall, the efficacy of “showing more” depended on matching consumers’ visual-processing style and the level (gestalt vs. component) at which products are differentiated.