Deborah A. Small’s research while affiliated with Yale-New Haven Hospital and other places

Evidence from a large, preregistered field experiment reveals that making the social impact case for sharing can reduce concerns about bragging and increase word-of-mouth in the domain of charity.

When a romantic relationship becomes serious, partners often confront a foundational decision about how to organize their personal finances: pool money together or keep things separate? In a six-wave longitudinal experiment, we investigated whether randomly assigning engaged or newlywed couples to merge their money in a joint bank account increases relationship quality over time. Whereas couples assigned to keep their money in separate accounts or to a no-intervention condition exhibited the normative decline in relationship quality across the first two years of marriage, couples assigned to merge money in a joint account sustained strong relationship quality throughout. The effect of bank account structure on relationship quality is multiply determined. We examine—and find support for—three potential mechanisms using both experimental and correlational methods: merging finances 1) improves how partners feel about how they handle money, 2) promotes financial goal alignment, and 3) sustains communal norm adherence (e.g., responding to each other’s needs without expectations of reciprocity). While prior research has documented a correlation between financial interdependence and relationship quality, our research offers the first experimental evidence that increasing financial interdependence helps newlyweds preserve stronger relationship quality throughout the newlywed period and potentially beyond.

Kumar and Epley (2023) review robust evidence for an intriguing hypothesis: That people fail to appreciate the benefits of everyday social behaviors and thus hesitate to connect with others in ways that would increase well‐being. In this commentary, we discuss how consumer research can enrich theory and application in this emerging line of inquiry. We suggest (a) that the hedonic implications of undersociality can be integrated with reputational signaling insights to generate new questions about the wisdom and utility of social behavior, and (b) that undersociality has interesting implications for a consumption domain of particular interest to maximizing welfare: charitable giving.

The widespread demand for luxury is best understood by the social advantages of signaling status (i.e., conspicuous consumption; Veblen, 1899). In the present research, we examine the limits of this perspective by studying the implications of status signaling for cooperation. Cooperation is principally about caring for others, which is fundamentally at odds with the self-promotional nature of signaling status. Across behaviorally consequential Prisoner's Dilemma (PD) games and naturalistic scenario studies, we investigate both sides of the relationship between signaling and cooperation: (a) how people respond to others who signal status, as well as (b) the strategic choices people make about whether to signal status. In each case, we find that people recognize the relative advantage of modesty (i.e., the inverse of signaling status) and behave strategically to enable cooperation. That is, people are less likely to cooperate with partners who signal status compared to those who are modest (Studies 1 and 2), and more likely to select a modest person when cooperation is desirable (Study 3). These behaviors are consistent with inferences that status signalers are less prosocial and less prone to cooperate. Importantly, people also refrain from signaling status themselves when it is strategically beneficial to appear cooperative (Studies 4-6). Together, our findings contribute to a better understanding of the conditions under which the reputational costs of conspicuous consumption outweigh its benefits, helping integrate theoretical perspectives on strategic interpersonal dynamics, cooperation, and status signaling. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

The widespread demand for luxury is best understood by the social advantages of signaling status (i.e., conspicuous consumption; Veblen, 1899). In the present research, we examine the limits of this perspective by studying the implications of status signaling for cooperation. Cooperation is principally about caring for others, which is fundamentally at odds with the self-promotional nature of signaling status. Across behaviorally-consequential Prisoner’s Dilemma games and naturalistic scenario studies, we investigate both sides of the relationship between signaling and cooperation: a) how people respond to others who signal status, as well as b) the strategic choices people make about whether to signal status. In each case, we find that people recognize the relative advantage of modesty (i.e., the inverse of signaling status) and behave strategically to enable cooperation. That is, people are less likely to cooperate with partners who signal status compared to those who are modest (Studies 1 and 2), and more likely to select a modest person when cooperation is desirable (Study 3). These behaviors are consistent with inferences that status signalers are less prosocial and less prone to cooperate. Importantly, people also refrain from signaling status themselves when it is strategically beneficial to appear cooperative (Studies 4-6). Together, our findings contribute to a better understanding of the conditions under which the reputational costs of conspicuous consumption outweigh its benefits, helping integrate theoretical perspectives on strategic interpersonal dynamics, cooperation, and status signaling.

In a correlational pilot study, we examine the association between perceived entry order (i.e., first mover or follower), motive inferences, and downstream brand evaluations in the context of a real cause‐marketing product. We presented participants with images and information about a real prosocial follower (BOBS) and investigated whether pre‐existing familiarity with its corresponding first mover (TOMS) predicted motive inferences and brand evaluations. We thus capitalized on variation in participants’ existing knowledge about entry order to provide an initial test of our predictions. We suspected that participants who believed BOBS to be a follower would see its buy‐one, give‐one program as less purely motivated and evaluate the brand more negatively.

Previous research suggests that choice causes an illusion of control—that it makes people feel more likely to achieve preferable outcomes, even when they are selecting among options that are functionally identical (e.g., lottery tickets with an identical chance of winning). This research has been widely accepted as evidence that choice can have significant welfare effects, even when it confers no actual control. In this article, we report the results of 17 experiments that examined whether choice truly causes an illusion of control ( N = 10,825 online and laboratory participants). We found that choice rarely makes people feel more likely to achieve preferable outcomes—unless it makes the preferable outcomes actually more likely—and when it does, it is not because choice causes an illusion but because choice reflects some participants’ preexisting (illusory) beliefs that the functionally identical options are not identical. Overall, choice does not seem to cause an illusion of control.

Technological innovations are creating new products, services, and markets that satisfy enduring consumer needs. These technological innovations create value for consumers and firms in many ways, but they also disrupt psychological ownership––the feeling that a thing is MINE. The authors describe two key dimensions of this technology-driven evolution of consumption pertaining to psychological ownership: (1) replacing legal ownership of private goods with legal access rights to goods and services owned and used by others, and (2) replacing “solid” material goods with “liquid” experiential goods. They propose that these consumption changes can have three effects on psychological ownership—threaten it, cause it to transfer to other targets, and create new opportunities to preserve it. These changes and their effects are organized in a framework and examined across three macro marketing trends: (1) growth of the sharing economy, (2) digitization of goods and services, and (3) expansion of personal data. This psychological ownership framework generates future research opportunities and actionable marketing strategies for firms seeking to preserve the positive consequences of psychological ownership, and navigate cases where it is a liability.