Derek D Rucker
Biographic Data
| ID | 77764 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Derek D Rucker |
| GIVEN NAMES | Derek D |
| FAMILY NAME | Rucker |
| SIGNATURE | RUCKER D D |
| AFFILIATIONS | Northwestern University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-4729-0549 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 61 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 553 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 58 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 3 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2000 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 13 |
Persuasion via intermediaries: The pull of extremity
Status decoded: How actors and observers shape the meaning of stealth symbols
Understanding the belief–behavior gap: Insights from attitudes research
Belief change does not always lead to behavior change. This belief–behavior gap has received considerable atention, particularly in the context of misinformation. We expand upon ideas in the literature by offering additional insight derived from research on attitudes. Specifically, we propose that lessons from attitudes research can be applied to the belief–behavior relationship to further understand when belief change will and will not promote b…
Unnecessarily divided: Civil conversations reduce attitude polarization more than people expect
People with opposing attitudes can learn from one another through civil discourse and debate. Yet, people routinely avoid discussing their differences of opinion, preferring instead to discuss their attitudes with like-minded others. We propose that people lack interest in discussing their differences of opinion, in part, because they expect such conversations are unlikely to change their own and others' attitudes. Importantly, we find these expe…
Dominance versus Prestige Hierarchies: How Social Hierarchy Base Shapes Conspicuous Consumption
Consumers are known to seek out and display conspicuous goods—items that are exclusive and signal wealth and high social standing. Though many factors can drive such conspicuous consumption, the present work looks at an unexplored element: whether consumers find themselves in a dominance versus prestige-based hierarchy. Dominance-based hierarchies encourage consumers to use threatening, assertive, and manipulative behaviors to navigate the hierar…
The allure of consensus: People (over)seek consensus in selecting group persuasion strategies
How do people select targets when tasked with persuading a group of people? One approach would be to prioritize getting people in support of the persuader's position to hold relatively extreme attitudes-an extremity strategy. An alternative approach would be to prioritize getting as many people as possible to support the persuader's position, regardless of how extreme they are-a consensus strategy . Although some situations might allow persuaders…
The vicious cycle of status insecurity
The current research presents and tests a new model: The Vicious Cycle of Status Insecurity. We define status insecurity as doubting whether one is respected and admired by others. Status insecurity leads people to view status as a limited and zero-sum resource, where a boost in the status of one individual inherently decreases that of other individuals. As a result, the insecure become reluctant to share status in the form of highlighting the co…
Power and Need-for-Justification: Asymmetrical Effects on Senders and Receivers in Marketing Communications
This research reveals how a fundamental and pervasive psychological state, feeling powerful, asymmetrically impacts consumers’ construction of and response to communications. For senders, power reduces consumers’ need-for-justification and lowers the degree of support they seek and use to construct their communications. This lowered degree of support is evidenced by reduced information search, the use of fewer rational-based arguments, and a grea…
Are We There Yet? An Anticipation Account of the Return Trip Effect
Research has documented the psychological phenomenon in which the trip back from a destination is experienced as shorter than the trip to the destination. Deemed the “return trip effect” (RTE), prior work explained this phenomenon in terms of differential familiarity between home and outbound destination or an underestimation of initial travel time. The present article posits an anticipation account for the RTE: Outbound trips to a destination te…
Act boldly: Important life decisions, courage, and the motivated pursuit of risk
How do people respond to risk in important life decisions? For example, when presented with the opportunity to leave one's job to start a business-a risky proposition for most-or to stay put-often a safer course of action-what do people choose? The current work explores the idea that important life decisions offer people the opportunity to display a highly valued psychological characteristic: courage. Specifically, important life decisions often …
Mass-scale emotionality reveals human behaviour and marketplace success
Emotionally Numb: Expertise Dulls Consumer Experience
Expertise provides numerous benefits. Experts process information more efficiently, remember information better, and often make better decisions. Consumers pursue expertise in domains they love and chase experiences that make them feel something. Yet, might becoming an expert carry a cost for these very feelings? Across more than 700,000 consumers and 6 million observations, developing expertise in a hedonic domain predicts consumers becoming mor…
Individual Differences in Attitude Consistency Over Time: The Personal Attitude Stability Scale
This research finds evidence for reliable individual differences in people’s perceived attitude stability that predict the actual stability of their attitudes over time. Study 1 examines the reliability and factor structure of an 11-item Personal Attitude Stability Scale (PASS). Study 2 establishes test–retest reliability for the PASS over a 5-week period. Studies 3a and 3b demonstrate the convergent and discriminant validity of the PASS in relat…
Saving Your Self: How Identity Relevance Influences Product Usage
Although research has consistently demonstrated that people prefer to purchase products and brands that represent their identity, relatively little research has examined how this identity relevance influences product usage. Drawing from work on intertemporal choice, the present work proposes a conceptual framework for the influence of identity on product usage. The authors theorize and demonstrate an identity conservation effect, in that consumer…
Perceiving attitude change: How qualitative shifts augment change perception
Choosing persuasion targets: How expectations of qualitative change increase advocacy intentions
Undermining the Restorative Potential of Compensatory Consumption: A Product's Explicit Identity Connection Impedes Self-Repair
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 effective in repairing the self-concept. Across seven experiments, we show that whether compensatory consump…
The Compensatory Consumer Behavior Model: How self‐discrepancies drive consumer behavior
Power and Categorization: Power Increases the Number and Abstractness of Categories
Across three experiments, participants formed a larger number of categories when in a state of high, compared to low, psychological power. Moreover, in contrast to prior categorization research, which suggests forming more categories is tantamount to reduced breadth of categorization, high-power participants also formed a larger number of superordinate (i.e., more abstract) categories than low-power participants. The present findings enhance the …
Timing Matters: How Social Influence Affects Adoption Pre- and Post-Product Release
Social influence is typically studied after a product is released. Yet, audience expectations and discussions begin before a product’s release. This observation suggests a need to understand adoption processes over a product’s life cycle. To explore pre- and postrelease social influence processes, this article uses survey data from Americans exposed to word of mouth for 309 Hollywood movies released over two and a half years. The data suggest pre…
Psychological mindsets affect consumption: How different mindsets help (hurt) portion control
Power and perspective-taking: A critical examination
A Tutorial in Consumer Research: Knowledge Creation and Knowledge Appreciation in Deductive-Conceptual Consumer Research
A typical article in a top-tier business journal can require as much as $400,000 in academic labor costs (Terwiesch and Ulrich 2014). This estimate raises the question of what makes a contribution worthy of such a significant financial investment. How does an academic community determine the value of a contribution? We propose that two criteria inform judgments of value: the amount of knowledge creation and the amount of knowledge appreciation. I…
Dynamics of Communicator and Audience Power: The Persuasiveness of Competence versus Warmth
The current research offers a new theoretical perspective on the relationship between power and persuasion. An agentic-communal model of power is presented that proposes power affects both the messages generated by communicators and the messages that persuade audiences. Compared to low-power states, high-power states produce a greater emphasis on information that conveys competence. As a consequence, high-power communicators generate messages wit…
The Cambridge Handbook of Consumer Psychology
Why do consumers make the purchases they do, and which ones make them truly happy? Why are consumers willing to spend huge sums of money to appear high status? This handbook addresses these key questions and many more. It provides a comprehensive overview of consumer psychology, examining cutting-edge research at the individual, interpersonal, and societal levels. Leading scholars summarize past and current findings and consider future lines of i…
Desire to Acquire: Powerlessness and Compensatory Consumption
Three experiments examine how power affects consumers' spending propensities. By integrating literatures suggesting that (a) powerlessness is aversive, (b) status is one basis of power, and (c) products can signal status, the authors argue that low power fosters a desire to acquire products associated with status to compensate for lacking power. Supporting this compensatory hypothesis, results show that low power increased consumers' willingness …
The effects of message recipients' power before and after persuasion: A self-validation analysis
In the present research, the authors examined the effect of a message recipient's power on attitude change and introduced a new mechanism by which power can affect social judgment. In line with prior research that suggested a link between power and approach tendencies, the authors hypothesized that having power increases confidence relative to being powerless. After demonstrating this link in Experiment 1, in 4 additional studies, they examined t…
Memory-based versus on-line processing: Implications for attitude strength
Conspicuous consumption versus utilitarian ideals: How different levels of power shape consumer behavior
Unpacking attitude certainty: Attitude clarity and attitude correctness
Attitude certainty has been the subject of considerable attention in the attitudes and persuasion literature. The present research identifies 2 aspects of attitude certainty and provides evidence for the distinctness of the constructs. Specifically, it is proposed that attitude certainty can be conceptualized, and empirically separated, in terms of attitude clarity (the subjective sense that one knows what one's attitude is) and attitude correctn…
Beyond valence in the perception of likelihood: The role of emotion specificity
Positive and negative moods have been shown to increase likelihood estimates of future events matching these states in valence (e.g., E. J. Johnson & A. Tversky, 1983). In the present article, 4 studies provide evidence that this congruency bias (a) is not limited to valence but functions in an emotion-specific manner, (b) derives from the informational value of emotions, and (c) is not the inevitable outcome of likelihood assessment under height…
Generous Paupers and Stingy Princes: Power Drives Consumer Spending on Self versus Others
This research examines how consumers' spending on themselves versus others can be affected by temporary shifts in their states of power. Five experiments found that individuals experiencing a state of power spent more money on themselves than on others, whereas those experiencing a state of powerlessness spent more money on others than on themselves. This effect was observed using a variety of power manipulations (hierarchical roles, print advert…
Social class, power, and selfishness: When and why upper and lower class individuals behave unethically
Are the rich more unethical than the poor? To answer this question, the current research introduces a key conceptual distinction between selfish and unethical behavior. Based on this distinction, the current article offers 2 novel findings that illuminate the relationship between social class and unethical behavior. First, the effects of social class on unethical behavior are not invariant; rather, the effects of social class are moderated by whe…
Retracted: Super Size Me: Product Size as a Signal of Status
International audience
Discrete Emotions and Persuasion: The Role of Emotion-Induced Expectancies
The authors argue that specific emotions can alter the persuasive impact of messages as a function of the emotional framing of persuasive appeals. Because specific emotions inflate expectancies for events possessing matching emotional overtones (D. DeSteno, R. E. Petty, D. T. Wegener, & D. D. Rucker, 2000), the authors predicted that attempts at persuasion would be more successful when messages were framed with emotional overtones matching the em…
When Resistance Is Futile: Consequences of Failed Counterarguing for Attitude Certainty
This research tests the notion that attitudes after a failed attempt to counterargue may be stronger than attitudes after undirected thinking. Specifically, failed counterarguing may be accompanied by unique metacognitions that serve to strengthen the attitude. The present research examines this issue by giving participants a very strong message and instructing them to counterargue or simply think about the message. Across several experiments, at…
A new look at the consequences of attitude certainty: The amplification hypothesis
It is well established that increasing attitude certainty makes attitudes more resistant to attack and more predictive of behavior. This finding has been interpreted as indicating that attitude certainty crystallizes attitudes, making them more durable and impactful. The current research challenges this crystallization hypothesis and proposes an amplification hypothesis, which suggests that instead of invariably strengthening an attitude, attitud…
Dynamics of Communicator and Audience Power: The Persuasiveness of Competence versus Warmth
The current research offers a new theoretical perspective on the relationship between power and persuasion. An agentic-communal model of power is presented that proposes power affects both the messages generated by communicators and the messages that persuade audiences. Compared to low-power states, high-power states produce a greater emphasis on information that conveys competence. As a consequence, high-power communicators generate messages wit…
Perils of Compensatory Consumption: Within-Domain Compensation Undermines Subsequent Self-Regulation
Prior research has shown that psychological threat can provoke consumers to desire, seek out, and acquire products that symbolize accomplishment in the domain of the threat. Although such within-domain compensation can serve as a psychological salve to repair the self, the current research suggests that sometimes this form of compensation can have ill effects. Specifically, engaging in within-domain compensation can trigger ruminative thinking ab…
The Experience versus the Expectations of Power: A Recipe for Altering the Effects of Power on Behavior
Power transforms consumer behavior. This research introduces a critical theoretical moderator of power's effects by promoting the idea that power is accompanied by both an experience (how it feels to have or lack power) and expectations (schemas and scripts as to how those with or without power behave). In some cases, the psychological experience of power predisposes people to behave one way, whereas attention to the expectations of power suggest…
Bracing for the Psychological Storm: Proactive versus Reactive Compensatory Consumption
This research introduces the distinction between compensatory consumption that is engaged in after, as opposed to before, one experiences a self-threat (termed reactive vs. proactive compensatory consumption). Five experiments document the phenomenon of proactive compensatory consumption as well as corresponding boundary conditions for its effect. Furthermore, whereas both reactive and proactive compensatory consumption are associated with seekin…
Personality Certainty and Politics: Increasing the Predictive Utility of Individual‐Difference Inventories
Research on political psychology has benefitted from using individual‐difference measures to predict political attitudes and behavior. And, previous research has further identified a number of specific variables that enhance the predictive utility of individual‐difference scales. However, a potentially important factor that has been overlooked is the certainty with which people make their responses. The present research establishes that the certa…
Power gets the job: Priming power improves interview outcomes
Beyond attitude consensus: The social context of persuasion and resistance
Power and Action Orientation: Power as a Catalyst for Consumer Switching Behavior
Building on an action-orientation perspective of power, original hypotheses regarding power and consumer switching behavior are presented. Because high power is associated with a readiness to act, and switching behavior often requires taking action in some form, inducing consumers to feel powerful is hypothesized to increase consumer switching. Multiple experiments provide support for this perspective along with evidence for the process via both …
Order of actions mitigates hypocrisy judgments for ingroup more than outgroup members
Compared to the conventional order of hypocritical actions—saying one thing and then doing another—merely reversing the order of these actions can mitigate whether an individual is judged to be a hypocrite (Barden, Rucker, & Petty, 2005). The present research examines how factors extraneous to a target’s own actions—specifically, group membership—influence hypocrisy judgments. Three experiments provided consistent evidence that reversing the orde…
When increased confidence yields increased thought: A confidence-matching hypothesis
Emotionally Numb: Expertise Dulls Consumer Experience
Expertise provides numerous benefits. Experts process information more efficiently, remember information better, and often make better decisions. Consumers pursue expertise in domains they love and chase experiences that make them feel something. Yet, might becoming an expert carry a cost for these very feelings? Across more than 700,000 consumers and 6 million observations, developing expertise in a hedonic domain predicts consumers becoming mor…
Perceiving attitude change: How qualitative shifts augment change perception
Power and perspective-taking: A critical examination
Beyond valence in the perception of likelihood: The role of emotion specificity
Positive and negative moods have been shown to increase likelihood estimates of future events matching these states in valence (e.g., E. J. Johnson & A. Tversky, 1983). In the present article, 4 studies provide evidence that this congruency bias (a) is not limited to valence but functions in an emotion-specific manner, (b) derives from the informational value of emotions, and (c) is not the inevitable outcome of likelihood assessment under height…
On the practice of dichotomization of quantitative variables.
The authors examine the practice of dichotomization of quantitative measures, wherein relationships among variables are examined after 1 or more variables have been converted to dichotomous variables by splitting the sample at some point on the scale(s) of measurement. A common form of dichotomization is the median split, where the independent variable is split at the median to form high and low groups, which are then compared with respect to the…
The Impact of Personality on Cognitive, Behavioral, and Affective Political Processes: The Effects of Need to Evaluate
Need to evaluate (NE) is a personality trait that reflects a person's proclivity to create and hold attitudes; people high in NE are especially likely to form attitudes toward all sorts of objects. Using data from the 1998 National Election Survey Pilot and the 2000 National Election Survey, NE was shown to predict a variety of important attitude‐relevant cognitive, behavioral, and affective political processes beyond simply holding attitudes: NE…
Discrete Emotions and Persuasion: The Role of Emotion-Induced Expectancies
The authors argue that specific emotions can alter the persuasive impact of messages as a function of the emotional framing of persuasive appeals. Because specific emotions inflate expectancies for events possessing matching emotional overtones (D. DeSteno, R. E. Petty, D. T. Wegener, & D. D. Rucker, 2000), the authors predicted that attempts at persuasion would be more successful when messages were framed with emotional overtones matching the em…
When Resistance Is Futile: Consequences of Failed Counterarguing for Attitude Certainty
This research tests the notion that attitudes after a failed attempt to counterargue may be stronger than attitudes after undirected thinking. Specifically, failed counterarguing may be accompanied by unique metacognitions that serve to strengthen the attitude. The present research examines this issue by giving participants a very strong message and instructing them to counterargue or simply think about the message. Across several experiments, at…
Use of the Extreme Groups Approach: A Critical Reexamination and New Recommendations.
Analysis of continuous variables sometimes proceeds by selecting individuals on the basis of extreme scores of a sample distribution and submitting only those extreme scores to further analysis. This sampling method is known as the extreme groups approach (EGA). EGA is often used to achieve greater statistical power in subsequent hypothesis tests. However, there are several largely unrecognized costs associated with EGA that must be considered. T…
Memory-based versus on-line processing: Implications for attitude strength
When increased confidence yields increased thought: A confidence-matching hypothesis
Addressing Moderated Mediation Hypotheses: Theory, Methods, and Prescriptions
This article provides researchers with a guide to properly construe and conduct analyses of conditional indirect effects, commonly known as moderated mediation effects. We disentangle conflicting definitions of moderated mediation and describe approaches for estimating and testing a variety of hypotheses involving conditional indirect effects. We introduce standard errors for hypothesis testing and construction of confidence intervals in large sa…
Unpacking attitude certainty: Attitude clarity and attitude correctness
Attitude certainty has been the subject of considerable attention in the attitudes and persuasion literature. The present research identifies 2 aspects of attitude certainty and provides evidence for the distinctness of the constructs. Specifically, it is proposed that attitude certainty can be conceptualized, and empirically separated, in terms of attitude clarity (the subjective sense that one knows what one's attitude is) and attitude correctn…
The effects of message recipients' power before and after persuasion: A self-validation analysis
In the present research, the authors examined the effect of a message recipient's power on attitude change and introduced a new mechanism by which power can affect social judgment. In line with prior research that suggested a link between power and approach tendencies, the authors hypothesized that having power increases confidence relative to being powerless. After demonstrating this link in Experiment 1, in 4 additional studies, they examined t…
Beyond attitude consensus: The social context of persuasion and resistance
A new look at the consequences of attitude certainty: The amplification hypothesis
It is well established that increasing attitude certainty makes attitudes more resistant to attack and more predictive of behavior. This finding has been interpreted as indicating that attitude certainty crystallizes attitudes, making them more durable and impactful. The current research challenges this crystallization hypothesis and proposes an amplification hypothesis, which suggests that instead of invariably strengthening an attitude, attitud…
Desire to Acquire: Powerlessness and Compensatory Consumption
Three experiments examine how power affects consumers' spending propensities. By integrating literatures suggesting that (a) powerlessness is aversive, (b) status is one basis of power, and (c) products can signal status, the authors argue that low power fosters a desire to acquire products associated with status to compensate for lacking power. Supporting this compensatory hypothesis, results show that low power increased consumers' willingness …
Doubting one’s doubt: A formula for confidence
Conspicuous consumption versus utilitarian ideals: How different levels of power shape consumer behavior
The Accentuation Bias: Money Literally Looms Larger (and Sometimes Smaller) to the Powerless
The present research explores how people’s place in a power hierarchy alters their representations of valued objects. The authors hypothesized that powerlessness produces an accentuation bias by altering the physical representation of monetary objects in a manner consistent with the size-to-value relationship. In the first three experiments, powerless participants, induced through episodic priming or role manipulations, systematically overestimat…
Power and Choice: Their Dynamic Interplay in Quenching the Thirst for Personal Control
Power and choice represent two fundamental forces that govern human behavior. Scholars have largely treated power as an interpersonal construct involving control over other individuals, whereas choice has largely been treated as an intrapersonal construct that concerns the ability to select a preferred course of action. Although these constructs have historically been studied separately, we propose that they share a common foundation—that both ar…
Mediation Analysis in Social Psychology: Current Practices and New Recommendations
A key aim of social psychology is to understand the psychological processes through which independent variables affect dependent variables in the social domain. This objective has given rise to statistical methods for mediation analysis. In mediation analysis, the significance of the relationship between the independent and dependent variables has been integral in theory testing, being used as a basis to determine (1) whether to proceed with anal…
Generous Paupers and Stingy Princes: Power Drives Consumer Spending on Self versus Others
This research examines how consumers' spending on themselves versus others can be affected by temporary shifts in their states of power. Five experiments found that individuals experiencing a state of power spent more money on themselves than on others, whereas those experiencing a state of powerlessness spent more money on others than on themselves. This effect was observed using a variety of power manipulations (hierarchical roles, print advert…
Power and consumer behavior: How power shapes who and what consumers value
Retracted: Super Size Me: Product Size as a Signal of Status
International audience
Bracing for the Psychological Storm: Proactive versus Reactive Compensatory Consumption
This research introduces the distinction between compensatory consumption that is engaged in after, as opposed to before, one experiences a self-threat (termed reactive vs. proactive compensatory consumption). Five experiments document the phenomenon of proactive compensatory consumption as well as corresponding boundary conditions for its effect. Furthermore, whereas both reactive and proactive compensatory consumption are associated with seekin…
Order of actions mitigates hypocrisy judgments for ingroup more than outgroup members
Compared to the conventional order of hypocritical actions—saying one thing and then doing another—merely reversing the order of these actions can mitigate whether an individual is judged to be a hypocrite (Barden, Rucker, & Petty, 2005). The present research examines how factors extraneous to a target’s own actions—specifically, group membership—influence hypocrisy judgments. Three experiments provided consistent evidence that reversing the orde…
Power gets the job: Priming power improves interview outcomes
Psychology (53 works) · Social Psychology (46 works) · Social and Intergroup Psychology (35 works) · Cultural Differences and Values (28 works) · Computer Science (20 works) · Cognitive psychology (17 works) · Consumer Behavior in Brand Consumption and Identification (17 works) · Social Psychology (17 works) · Behavioral Health and Interventions (16 works) · Sociology (13 works)