Gavan J Fitzsimons
Biographic Data
| ID | 78203 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Gavan J Fitzsimons |
| GIVEN NAMES | Gavan J |
| FAMILY NAME | Fitzsimons |
| SIGNATURE | FITZSIMONS G J |
| AFFILIATIONS | Duke University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-1468-1914 |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 38 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 394 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 38 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1996 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 11 |
Brief Commentary: Theory Testing for Differences in Process—Hypothesizing, Testing, and Reporting Comparisons Between Indirect Effects
Consumer researchers often compare a proposed process across contexts (i.e., moderated mediation) or across mediators (e.g., ruling out an alternative process in parallel mediation). This article aims to help researchers in mapping process-related theoretical hypotheses onto statistical coefficients and in reporting their results. Researchers can formulate a variety of hypotheses about the conditional indirect effect (CIE) of a predictor X on an …
From believer to buyer: How brands leverage religious values to connect with consumers
Aglozo and Cohen ( Journal of Consumer Psychology , 2025) synthesize prior work on the influence of religious values on consumer behavior through the frameworks of Schwartz's value theory and moral foundations theory. In this commentary, we extend their work by examining the intersection of religious values and branding. First, we build upon existing frameworks to identify pathways through which brands can leverage religious values (people‐based …
Quality–Quantity Tradeoffs in Consumption
Tradeoffs between quality and quantity are widespread in consumer decision-making. While existing research has focused on situational and contextual factors driving choices of higher-quality or higher-quantity purchases, in the current work, we find that consumers possess generalized preferences for quality or quantity across purchase categories. Some consumers systematically prefer quality over quantity, and others systematically prefer quantity…
Exploring the counteractive effects of mandating diversity training: Solution aversion, reactance, and polarized social beliefs
A common strategy to address social inequity in organizations is to implement mandatory diversity training policies. But how do people react to such mandates? However, integrating the theory of psychological reactance (Brehm, 1966) with the notion of solution aversion (Campbell & Kay, 2014), we suggest that learning about mandatory diversity training initiatives (compared to optional ones) could also exert an opposing effect, engendering negative…
Brand Teasing: How Brands Build Strong Relationships by Making Fun of Their Consumers
Popular brands like Wendy's, Postmates, and RyanAir have gained notoriety by making fun of their consumers, but is this an effective strategy to build strong consumer relationships? Across 11 (seven pre-registered) studies, using lab data, field data, and a variety of analytical approaches, the current research demonstrates that teasing communication increases consumer engagement with and connection to the brand compared to merely funny or neutra…
When do photos on products hurt or help consumption? How magical thinking shapes consumer reactions to photo‐integrated products
Consumers and companies frequently integrate products with lifelike photographs of people, animals, and other entities. However, consumer responses to such products are relatively unknown. Drawing on magical thinking and moral psychology, we propose that, due to a photograph's lifelike resemblance to its referent, consumers believe that photo‐integrated products embody the depicted entity's underlying essence. As such, in cases where consumption …
The Precarity of Progress: Implications of a Shifting Gendered Division of Labor for Relationships and Well-Being as a Function of Country-Level Gender Equality
The onset of the COVID-19 pandemic saw a shift toward a more traditional division of labor–one where women took greater responsibility for household tasks and childcare than men. We tested whether this regressive shift was more acutely perceived and experienced by women in countries with greater gender equality. Cross-cultural longitudinal survey data for women and men ( N = 10,238) was collected weekly during the first few months of the pandemic…
Intentions to be Vaccinated Against Covid-19: The Role of Prosociality and Conspiracy Beliefs across 20 Countries
Understanding the determinants of COVID-19 vaccine uptake is important to inform policy decisions and plan vaccination campaigns. The aims of this research were to: (1) explore the individual- and country-level determinants of intentions to be vaccinated against SARS-CoV-2, and (2) examine worldwide variation in vaccination intentions. This cross-sectional online survey was conducted during the first wave of the pandemic, involving 6697 responden…
Pandemic boredom: Little evidence that lockdown-related boredom affects risky public health behaviors across 116 countries
Some public officials have expressed concern that policies mandating collective public health behaviors (e.g., national/regional "lockdown") may result in behavioral fatigue that ultimately renders such policies ineffective. Boredom, specifically, has been singled out as one potential risk factor for noncompliance. We examined whether there was empirical evidence to support this concern during the COVID-19 pandemic in a large cross-national sampl…
Identifying important individual‐ and country‐level predictors of conspiracy theorizing: A machine learning analysis
Psychological research on the predictors of conspiracy theorizing—explaining important social and political events or circumstances as secret plots by malevolent groups—has flourished in recent years. However, research has typically examined only a small number of predictors in one, or a small number of, national contexts. Such approaches make it difficult to examine the relative importance of predictors, and risk overlooking some potentially rel…
Lockdown Lives: A Longitudinal Study of Inter-Relationships Among Feelings of Loneliness, Social Contacts, and Solidarity During the Covid-19 Lockdown in Early 2020
We examine how social contacts and feelings of solidarity shape experiences of loneliness during the COVID-19 lockdown in early 2020. From the PsyCorona database, we obtained longitudinal data from 23 countries, collected between March and May 2020. The results demonstrated that although online contacts help to reduce feelings of loneliness, people who feel more lonely are less likely to use that strategy. Solidarity played only a small role in s…
We are all in the same boat’: How societal discontent affects intention to help during the Covid ‐19 pandemic
The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has caused a global health crisis. Consequently, many countries have adopted restrictive measures that caused a substantial change in society. Within this framework, it is reasonable to suppose that a sentiment of societal discontent, defined as generalized concern about the precarious state of society, has arisen. Literature shows that collectively experienced situations can motivate people to hel…
A Framework for Understanding Consumer Choices for Others
Although most research on consumers' choices, and resulting insights, have focused on choices that consumers make solely for themselves, consumers often make choices for others, and there is a growing literature examining such choices. Theoretically, how can this growing literature be integrated, and what gaps remain? Practically, why should marketers, consumers, and policy makers care when choices are made for others, and what should they do dif…
Wine for the Table: Self-Construal, Group Size, and Choice for Self and Others
This research examines how consumers make unilateral decisions on behalf of the self and multiple others, in situations where the chosen option will be shared and consumed jointly by the group-for instance, choosing wine for the table. Results across six studies using three different choice contexts (wine, books, and movies) demonstrate that such choices are shaped by the decision-maker's self-construal (independent vs. interdependent) and by the…
Delicate Snowflakes and Broken Bonds: A Conceptualization of Consumption-Based Offense
When do consumers experience offense due to another individual’s choice, use, display, gifting, sharing, or disposal of a product? Why do they experience offense, and does it matter if they do? In this article, we first draw from past work in multiple disciplines to offer a unique conceptualization of consumption-based offense. We then develop a framework of types of violations that may generate consumption-based offense and propose a set of affe…
Coke vs. Pepsi: Brand Compatibility, Relationship Power, and Life Satisfaction
Individuals often evaluate, purchase, and consume brands in the presence of others, including close others. Yet relatively little is known about the role brand preferences play in relationships. In the present research, the authors explore how the novel concept of brand compatibility, defined as the extent to which individuals have similar brand preferences (e.g., both partners prefer the same brand of soda), influences life satisfaction. The aut…
It's Too Pretty to Use! When and How Enhanced Product Aesthetics Discourage Usage and Lower Consumption Enjoyment
Marketers invest a lot of resources in product aesthetics and design, but does this strategy always lead to favorable consumer outcomes? While prior research suggests enhanced aesthetics should have a uniformly positive influence on pre-usage evaluations and choice, the present research examines the downstream effects of nondurable product aesthetics on consumption behavior and post-consumption affect. First, we document an inhibiting effect of a…
When Brands Reflect Our Ideal World: The Values and Brand Preferences of Consumers Who Support versus Reject Society's Dominant Ideology
In what ways can brands symbolize America’s defining values, and for whom do these values resonate? Drawing from research on values (Schwartz 1994), the symbolic power of brands (Holt 2004, 2006; McCracken 1986), and system justification theory (Jost and Banaji 1994), the current research explores (1) what values define America’s dominant ideology, (2) which consumers subscribe to these values, and (3) implications for brands that reflect versus …
Distinctively Different: Exposure to Multiple Brands in Low-Elaboration Settings
Consumers see many brands during the course of a day but often pay very little attention to how such exposures will influence their subsequent decisions. This research examines how being exposed to multiple brands at once affects consumers' reactions to these brands, particularly when little effort is exerted in processing this information. Focusing on the role of brand personalities, we argue that when a focal brand is seen with a brand that has…
Spotlights, Floodlights, and the Magic Number Zero: Simple Effects Tests in Moderated Regression
It is common for researchers discovering a significant interaction of a measured variable X with a manipulated variable Z to examine simple effects of Z at different levels of X. These “spotlight” tests are often misunderstood even in the simplest cases, and it appears that consumer researchers are unsure how to extend them to more complex designs. The authors explain the general principles of spotlight tests, show that they rely on familiar regr…
A Person by Situation Account of Motivated System Defense
Three studies demonstrate how individual differences in confidence in the sociopolitical system interact with threats that engage the system justification motive to produce system defense. Following threat, participants low, but not high, in system confidence increasingly defended the system, by rejecting system change (Study 1) and preferring domestic over international products (Studies 2 and 3). These findings contribute to the literature on s…
When Your World Must Be Defended: Choosing Products to Justify the System
Consumers are often strongly motivated to view themselves as part of a legitimate and fair external system. Our research focuses on how individuals adopt distinct ways of defending their system when it is threatened and, in particular, how this is revealed in their consumption choices. We find that although individuals differ in how confident they are in the legitimacy of their system, they do not differ in their motivation to defend the system w…
I'll Have What She's Having: Effects of Social Influence and Body Type on the Food Choices of Others
This research examines how the body type of consumers affects the food consumption of other consumers around them. We find that consumers anchor on the quantities others around them select but that these portions are adjusted according to the body type of the other consumer. We find that people choose a larger portion following another consumer who first selects a large quantity but that this portion is significantly smaller if the other is obese…
Vicarious Goal Fulfillment: When the Mere Presence of a Healthy Option Leads to an Ironically Indulgent Decision
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 on indulgent choice is stronger for those with higher levels of self-control. Support is found for …
Death to Dichotomizing: Figure 1
Why call for a death to dichotomizing? The Journal of Consumer Research receives manuscripts on an almost daily basis in which researchers have dichotomized (often referred to as median splitting) a continuous independent variable. There are two principal problems with this approach to data analysis, each of which is very well documented in the literature. The first is that by dichotomizing continuous independent variables researchers are quite l…
I'll Have What She's Having: Effects of Social Influence and Body Type on the Food Choices of Others
This research examines how the body type of consumers affects the food consumption of other consumers around them. We find that consumers anchor on the quantities others around them select but that these portions are adjusted according to the body type of the other consumer. We find that people choose a larger portion following another consumer who first selects a large quantity but that this portion is significantly smaller if the other is obese…
Death to Dichotomizing: Figure 1
Why call for a death to dichotomizing? The Journal of Consumer Research receives manuscripts on an almost daily basis in which researchers have dichotomized (often referred to as median splitting) a continuous independent variable. There are two principal problems with this approach to data analysis, each of which is very well documented in the literature. The first is that by dichotomizing continuous independent variables researchers are quite l…
Automatic Effects of Brand Exposure on Motivated Behavior: "How Apple Makes You "Think Different
This article first examines whether brand exposure elicits automatic behavioral effects as does exposure to social primes. Results support the translation of these effects: participants primed with Apple logos behave more creatively than IBM primed and controls; Disney-primed participants behave more honestly than E!-primed participants and controls. Second, this article investigates the hypothesis that exposure to goal-relevant brands (i.e., tho…
Vicarious Goal Fulfillment: When the Mere Presence of a Healthy Option Leads to an Ironically Indulgent Decision
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 on indulgent choice is stronger for those with higher levels of self-control. Support is found for …
Nonconscious relationship reactance: When significant others prime opposing goals
A Framework for Understanding Consumer Choices for Others
Although most research on consumers' choices, and resulting insights, have focused on choices that consumers make solely for themselves, consumers often make choices for others, and there is a growing literature examining such choices. Theoretically, how can this growing literature be integrated, and what gaps remain? Practically, why should marketers, consumers, and policy makers care when choices are made for others, and what should they do dif…
When Your World Must Be Defended: Choosing Products to Justify the System
Consumers are often strongly motivated to view themselves as part of a legitimate and fair external system. Our research focuses on how individuals adopt distinct ways of defending their system when it is threatened and, in particular, how this is revealed in their consumption choices. We find that although individuals differ in how confident they are in the legitimacy of their system, they do not differ in their motivation to defend the system w…
The effects of nonconsciously priming emotion concepts on behavior
Current empirical evidence regarding nonconsciously priming emotion concepts is limited to positively versus negatively valenced affect. This article demonstrates that specific, equally valenced emotion concepts can be nonconsciously activated, remain inaccessible to conscious awareness, and still affect behavior in an emotion-specific fashion. In Experiment 1A, participants subliminally primed with guilty emotion adjectives showed lower indulgen…
The Effect of Measuring Intent on Brand-Level Purchase Behavior
Previous research has demonstrated that merely asking consumers purchase intent questions has a significant impact on their actual purchase incidence in the category. Our article extends this research to explore the impact of the “mere-measurement” effect at the brand level. We hypothesize that there are predictable patterns of brand-level purchase effects that depend on whether a consumer has previously made a purchase in the product category. T…
When Consumers Do Not Recognize "Benign" Intention Questions as Persuasion Attempts
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. In experiment 3 we demonstrate that this finding holds with product choice and consumption, and we fi…
Consumer Response to Stockouts
Consumer responses to stockouts, both in terms of consumer satisfaction with the decision process and in terms of subsequent store choice behavior, are explored. Four laboratory experiments involving stockouts in a consumer choice context are run. The results suggest that consumer response to stockouts is driven in large part by two factors: the effect of a stockout on the difficulty of making a choice from the set and the degree of personal comm…
Nonconscious and Contaminative Effects of Hypothetical Questions on Subsequent Decision Making
In this article we examine the impact of asking hypothetical questions on respondents' subsequent decision making. Across several experiments we find that even though such questions are purely hypothetical, respondents are unable to prevent a substantial biasing effect on their behavior. Further, we find that an increase in cognitive elaboration increases the contaminative effects of hypothetical questions and that this increase occurs primarily …
Wine for the Table: Self-Construal, Group Size, and Choice for Self and Others
This research examines how consumers make unilateral decisions on behalf of the self and multiple others, in situations where the chosen option will be shared and consumed jointly by the group-for instance, choosing wine for the table. Results across six studies using three different choice contexts (wine, books, and movies) demonstrate that such choices are shaped by the decision-maker's self-construal (independent vs. interdependent) and by the…
The Brand Positivity Effect: When Evaluation Confers Preference
One of the most common forms of consumer judgment is singular evaluation: the evaluation or appraisal of singular brands. Three experiments show that singular evaluation is often characterized by a brand positivity effect—brands tend to be evaluated more positively than warranted when judged in isolation. In addition to demonstrating how the brand positivity effect may bias consumer judgments of and choice intention regarding products in very dif…
License to Sin: The Liberating Role of Reporting Expectations
This research examines the impact of asking intention questions about "vice behaviors," or behaviors about which respondents simultaneously hold both negative explicit and positive implicit attitudes. Asking questions about the likelihood of engaging in behaviors for which respondents maintain conflicting attitude structures appears to give respondents a "license to sin," resulting in increased rates of behavior versus those of a control group no…
It's Too Pretty to Use! When and How Enhanced Product Aesthetics Discourage Usage and Lower Consumption Enjoyment
Marketers invest a lot of resources in product aesthetics and design, but does this strategy always lead to favorable consumer outcomes? While prior research suggests enhanced aesthetics should have a uniformly positive influence on pre-usage evaluations and choice, the present research examines the downstream effects of nondurable product aesthetics on consumption behavior and post-consumption affect. First, we document an inhibiting effect of a…
When Brands Reflect Our Ideal World: The Values and Brand Preferences of Consumers Who Support versus Reject Society's Dominant Ideology
In what ways can brands symbolize America’s defining values, and for whom do these values resonate? Drawing from research on values (Schwartz 1994), the symbolic power of brands (Holt 2004, 2006; McCracken 1986), and system justification theory (Jost and Banaji 1994), the current research explores (1) what values define America’s dominant ideology, (2) which consumers subscribe to these values, and (3) implications for brands that reflect versus …
Personal appearance and consumption in popular culture: A framework for descriptive and prescriptive analysis
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 that embodies four perspectives on personal appearance and consumption in popular culture: Configuratio…
Delicate Snowflakes and Broken Bonds: A Conceptualization of Consumption-Based Offense
When do consumers experience offense due to another individual’s choice, use, display, gifting, sharing, or disposal of a product? Why do they experience offense, and does it matter if they do? In this article, we first draw from past work in multiple disciplines to offer a unique conceptualization of consumption-based offense. We then develop a framework of types of violations that may generate consumption-based offense and propose a set of affe…
The Precarity of Progress: Implications of a Shifting Gendered Division of Labor for Relationships and Well-Being as a Function of Country-Level Gender Equality
The onset of the COVID-19 pandemic saw a shift toward a more traditional division of labor–one where women took greater responsibility for household tasks and childcare than men. We tested whether this regressive shift was more acutely perceived and experienced by women in countries with greater gender equality. Cross-cultural longitudinal survey data for women and men ( N = 10,238) was collected weekly during the first few months of the pandemic…
Identifying important individual‐ and country‐level predictors of conspiracy theorizing: A machine learning analysis
Psychological research on the predictors of conspiracy theorizing—explaining important social and political events or circumstances as secret plots by malevolent groups—has flourished in recent years. However, research has typically examined only a small number of predictors in one, or a small number of, national contexts. Such approaches make it difficult to examine the relative importance of predictors, and risk overlooking some potentially rel…
Coke vs. Pepsi: Brand Compatibility, Relationship Power, and Life Satisfaction
Individuals often evaluate, purchase, and consume brands in the presence of others, including close others. Yet relatively little is known about the role brand preferences play in relationships. In the present research, the authors explore how the novel concept of brand compatibility, defined as the extent to which individuals have similar brand preferences (e.g., both partners prefer the same brand of soda), influences life satisfaction. The aut…
We are all in the same boat’: How societal discontent affects intention to help during the Covid ‐19 pandemic
The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has caused a global health crisis. Consequently, many countries have adopted restrictive measures that caused a substantial change in society. Within this framework, it is reasonable to suppose that a sentiment of societal discontent, defined as generalized concern about the precarious state of society, has arisen. Literature shows that collectively experienced situations can motivate people to hel…
Distinctively Different: Exposure to Multiple Brands in Low-Elaboration Settings
Consumers see many brands during the course of a day but often pay very little attention to how such exposures will influence their subsequent decisions. This research examines how being exposed to multiple brands at once affects consumers' reactions to these brands, particularly when little effort is exerted in processing this information. Focusing on the role of brand personalities, we argue that when a focal brand is seen with a brand that has…
The Effect of Measuring Intent on Brand-Level Purchase Behavior
Previous research has demonstrated that merely asking consumers purchase intent questions has a significant impact on their actual purchase incidence in the category. Our article extends this research to explore the impact of the “mere-measurement” effect at the brand level. We hypothesize that there are predictable patterns of brand-level purchase effects that depend on whether a consumer has previously made a purchase in the product category. T…
Personal appearance and consumption in popular culture: A framework for descriptive and prescriptive analysis
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 that embodies four perspectives on personal appearance and consumption in popular culture: Configuratio…
Consumer Response to Stockouts
Consumer responses to stockouts, both in terms of consumer satisfaction with the decision process and in terms of subsequent store choice behavior, are explored. Four laboratory experiments involving stockouts in a consumer choice context are run. The results suggest that consumer response to stockouts is driven in large part by two factors: the effect of a stockout on the difficulty of making a choice from the set and the degree of personal comm…
Nonconscious and Contaminative Effects of Hypothetical Questions on Subsequent Decision Making
In this article we examine the impact of asking hypothetical questions on respondents' subsequent decision making. Across several experiments we find that even though such questions are purely hypothetical, respondents are unable to prevent a substantial biasing effect on their behavior. Further, we find that an increase in cognitive elaboration increases the contaminative effects of hypothetical questions and that this increase occurs primarily …
Reactance to Recommendations: When Unsolicited Advice Yields Contrary Responses
Recommendations often play a positive role in the decision process by reducing the difficulty associated with choosing between options. However, in certain circumstances recommendations play a less positive and more undesirable role from the perspectives of both the recommending agent or agency and the person receiving the recommendation. Across a series of four studies, we explore consumer response when recommendations by experts and intelligent…
The Effect of Analyzing Reasons on the Stability of Brand Attitudes: A Reconciliation of Opposing Predictions
Past research has shown that thinking of reasons as to why one likes or dislikes an object can disrupt attitude stability, even though other forms of effortful pro-cessing (such as that induced by high involvement) typically produce strengthening effects on stability. The current article addresses this dilemma by showing that, depending on specific theoretically derived moderating factors, reasons analysis can produce either a disruptive or a str…
The Brand Positivity Effect: When Evaluation Confers Preference
One of the most common forms of consumer judgment is singular evaluation: the evaluation or appraisal of singular brands. Three experiments show that singular evaluation is often characterized by a brand positivity effect—brands tend to be evaluated more positively than warranted when judged in isolation. In addition to demonstrating how the brand positivity effect may bias consumer judgments of and choice intention regarding products in very dif…
When Consumers Do Not Recognize "Benign" Intention Questions as Persuasion Attempts
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. In experiment 3 we demonstrate that this finding holds with product choice and consumption, and we fi…
Spoken and Typed Expressions of Repeated Attitudes: Matching Response Modes Leads to Attitude Retrieval versus Construction
Speaking and typing recruit different cognitive, motor, and perceptual systems that result in the encoding of differentiated memory traces. These factors did not affect the expression of stimulus-based attitudes. However, matching response modes resulted in more consistent repeated attitudes in experiment 1 and more predictable choice behaviors in experiment 2 than mismatching response modes. Judgment-confidence and recall data in experiment 3 in…
Nonconscious relationship reactance: When significant others prime opposing goals
The effects of nonconsciously priming emotion concepts on behavior
Current empirical evidence regarding nonconsciously priming emotion concepts is limited to positively versus negatively valenced affect. This article demonstrates that specific, equally valenced emotion concepts can be nonconsciously activated, remain inaccessible to conscious awareness, and still affect behavior in an emotion-specific fashion. In Experiment 1A, participants subliminally primed with guilty emotion adjectives showed lower indulgen…
License to Sin: The Liberating Role of Reporting Expectations
This research examines the impact of asking intention questions about "vice behaviors," or behaviors about which respondents simultaneously hold both negative explicit and positive implicit attitudes. Asking questions about the likelihood of engaging in behaviors for which respondents maintain conflicting attitude structures appears to give respondents a "license to sin," resulting in increased rates of behavior versus those of a control group no…
Death to Dichotomizing: Figure 1
Why call for a death to dichotomizing? The Journal of Consumer Research receives manuscripts on an almost daily basis in which researchers have dichotomized (often referred to as median splitting) a continuous independent variable. There are two principal problems with this approach to data analysis, each of which is very well documented in the literature. The first is that by dichotomizing continuous independent variables researchers are quite l…
Automatic Effects of Brand Exposure on Motivated Behavior: "How Apple Makes You "Think Different
This article first examines whether brand exposure elicits automatic behavioral effects as does exposure to social primes. Results support the translation of these effects: participants primed with Apple logos behave more creatively than IBM primed and controls; Disney-primed participants behave more honestly than E!-primed participants and controls. Second, this article investigates the hypothesis that exposure to goal-relevant brands (i.e., tho…
Vicarious Goal Fulfillment: When the Mere Presence of a Healthy Option Leads to an Ironically Indulgent Decision
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 on indulgent choice is stronger for those with higher levels of self-control. Support is found for …
I'll Have What She's Having: Effects of Social Influence and Body Type on the Food Choices of Others
This research examines how the body type of consumers affects the food consumption of other consumers around them. We find that consumers anchor on the quantities others around them select but that these portions are adjusted according to the body type of the other consumer. We find that people choose a larger portion following another consumer who first selects a large quantity but that this portion is significantly smaller if the other is obese…
A Person by Situation Account of Motivated System Defense
Three studies demonstrate how individual differences in confidence in the sociopolitical system interact with threats that engage the system justification motive to produce system defense. Following threat, participants low, but not high, in system confidence increasingly defended the system, by rejecting system change (Study 1) and preferring domestic over international products (Studies 2 and 3). These findings contribute to the literature on s…
When Your World Must Be Defended: Choosing Products to Justify the System
Consumers are often strongly motivated to view themselves as part of a legitimate and fair external system. Our research focuses on how individuals adopt distinct ways of defending their system when it is threatened and, in particular, how this is revealed in their consumption choices. We find that although individuals differ in how confident they are in the legitimacy of their system, they do not differ in their motivation to defend the system w…
Spotlights, Floodlights, and the Magic Number Zero: Simple Effects Tests in Moderated Regression
It is common for researchers discovering a significant interaction of a measured variable X with a manipulated variable Z to examine simple effects of Z at different levels of X. These “spotlight” tests are often misunderstood even in the simplest cases, and it appears that consumer researchers are unsure how to extend them to more complex designs. The authors explain the general principles of spotlight tests, show that they rely on familiar regr…
Distinctively Different: Exposure to Multiple Brands in Low-Elaboration Settings
Consumers see many brands during the course of a day but often pay very little attention to how such exposures will influence their subsequent decisions. This research examines how being exposed to multiple brands at once affects consumers' reactions to these brands, particularly when little effort is exerted in processing this information. Focusing on the role of brand personalities, we argue that when a focal brand is seen with a brand that has…
When Brands Reflect Our Ideal World: The Values and Brand Preferences of Consumers Who Support versus Reject Society's Dominant Ideology
In what ways can brands symbolize America’s defining values, and for whom do these values resonate? Drawing from research on values (Schwartz 1994), the symbolic power of brands (Holt 2004, 2006; McCracken 1986), and system justification theory (Jost and Banaji 1994), the current research explores (1) what values define America’s dominant ideology, (2) which consumers subscribe to these values, and (3) implications for brands that reflect versus …
It's Too Pretty to Use! When and How Enhanced Product Aesthetics Discourage Usage and Lower Consumption Enjoyment
Marketers invest a lot of resources in product aesthetics and design, but does this strategy always lead to favorable consumer outcomes? While prior research suggests enhanced aesthetics should have a uniformly positive influence on pre-usage evaluations and choice, the present research examines the downstream effects of nondurable product aesthetics on consumption behavior and post-consumption affect. First, we document an inhibiting effect of a…
Coke vs. Pepsi: Brand Compatibility, Relationship Power, and Life Satisfaction
Individuals often evaluate, purchase, and consume brands in the presence of others, including close others. Yet relatively little is known about the role brand preferences play in relationships. In the present research, the authors explore how the novel concept of brand compatibility, defined as the extent to which individuals have similar brand preferences (e.g., both partners prefer the same brand of soda), influences life satisfaction. The aut…
A Framework for Understanding Consumer Choices for Others
Although most research on consumers' choices, and resulting insights, have focused on choices that consumers make solely for themselves, consumers often make choices for others, and there is a growing literature examining such choices. Theoretically, how can this growing literature be integrated, and what gaps remain? Practically, why should marketers, consumers, and policy makers care when choices are made for others, and what should they do dif…
Wine for the Table: Self-Construal, Group Size, and Choice for Self and Others
This research examines how consumers make unilateral decisions on behalf of the self and multiple others, in situations where the chosen option will be shared and consumed jointly by the group-for instance, choosing wine for the table. Results across six studies using three different choice contexts (wine, books, and movies) demonstrate that such choices are shaped by the decision-maker's self-construal (independent vs. interdependent) and by the…
Psychology (31 works) · Social Psychology (21 works) · Business (18 works) · Consumer Behavior in Brand Consumption and Identification (18 works) · Sociology (14 works) · Advertising (11 works) · Computer Science (10 works) · Economics (10 works) · Marketing (10 works) · Political science (9 works)