Mathew S Isaac
Biographic Data
| ID | 88120 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Mathew S Isaac |
| GIVEN NAMES | Mathew S |
| FAMILY NAME | Isaac |
| SIGNATURE | ISAAC M S |
| AFFILIATIONS | Seattle University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-3182-1341 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 12 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 79 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 11 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2014 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
Invisible Rankings: When Do Consumers Assume Best-to-Worst Ordinality When Choosing from an Unnumbered List?
Consumers frequently use lists that were created by marketers, experts, or media platforms, such as a list of favorite restaurants. The authors refer to such lists as curated lists because they include items that appear to be endorsed or recommended by the list maker. Although these lists are typically ranked and numbered, marketers sometimes create lists that are not numbered, making it unclear whether the items have been ranked. Twelve studies …
Limiting Accessibility: How Targeting Consumers with Disabilities Constrains Acceptable Prices for Innovations
People with disabilities constitute 15% of the world’s population with a total disposable income of more than $2.6 trillion. However, few companies offer products tailored to the needs of this segment, making it important to understand how mass-market consumers react to innovations that target people with disabilities. Nine studies and six supplementary studies (twelve preregistered) reveal that innovations targeting consumers with disabilities a…
To err is human: Bias salience can help overcome resistance to medical AI
Anxiety, Cognitive Availability, and the Talisman Effect of Insurance
Across four experiments ( N = 1,923), this research provides converging evidence of a talisman effect of insurance—consumers who have an insurance policy feel that the covered mishap is less likely to occur. Although such an effect has previously been proposed, empirical evidence for it is limited, in part because the talisman effect has often been conflated with a related but distinct magical-thinking phenomenon, the tempting-fate effect. By dis…
Affective debiasing: Focusing on emotion during consumption attenuates attribute framing effects
One of the most pervasive findings in attribute framing research is the valence consistent shift; that is, positively valenced frames (e.g., 95% natural ingredients) are preferred over semantically equivalent but negatively valenced frames (e.g., 5% artificial ingredients). Despite the robustness of this finding, it has primarily been observed in judgments of prospective or hypothetical consumption. When valenced frames are presented during or im…
The Downside of Divinity? Reputational Harm to Sectarian Universities from Overtly Religious Advertising
The present research explores whether the use of overtly religious advertising by a sectarian university affects its academic reputation. The authors propose that individuals assume universities that engage in more (vs. less) overt religious advertising devote a greater proportion of their institutional resources toward religious education. Further, they posit that individuals exhibit zero-sum thinking about resource allocation whereby they belie…
The Perfection Premium
This research documents a perfection premium in evaluative judgments wherein individuals disproportionately reward perfection on an attribute compared to near-perfect values on the same attribute. For example, individuals consider a student who earns a perfect score of 36 on the American College Test to be more intelligent than a student who earns a near-perfect 35, and this difference in perceived intelligence is significantly greater than the d…
Trust Does Beget Trustworthiness and Also Begets Trust in Others
Social scientists widely believe that trust begets trustworthiness, meaning that persons reward actions that they view as expressing trust. But evidence from the trust game (also known as the investment game)—introduced by Berg, Dickhaut, and McCabe and frequently used to test this relationship—is surprisingly inconclusive. The present article therefore reexamines this hypothesis (Experiment 1), using the trust game but incorporating mediation an…
Beyond Skepticism: Can Accessing Persuasion Knowledge Bolster Credibility
As defined by Friestad and Wright (1994), “persuasion knowledge” is personal knowledge about persuasion attempts that consumers develop and use whenever they believe they are targets of persuasion. A significant majority of research on persuasion knowledge has suggested that persuasion knowledge and skepticism invariably go hand in hand, and that accessing persuasion knowledge therefore leads consumers to evaluate the agent and its offering less …
Is Eco-Friendly Unmanly? The Green-Feminine Stereotype and Its Effect on Sustainable Consumption
Why are men less likely than women to embrace environmentally friendly products and behaviors? Whereas prior research attributes this gender gap in sustainable consumption to personality differences between the sexes, we propose that it may also partially stem from a prevalent association between green behavior and femininity, and a corresponding stereotype (held by both men and women) that green consumers are more feminine. Building on prior fin…
Judging a Part by the Size of Its Whole: The Category Size Bias in Probability Judgments
Whereas prior research has found that consumers' probability judgments are sensitive to the number of categories into which a set of possible outcomes is grouped, this article demonstrates that categorization can also bias predictions when the number of categories is fixed. Specifically, five experiments document a category size bias in which consumers perceive an outcome as more likely to occur when it is categorized with many rather than few al…
The Top-Ten Effect: Consumers' Subjective Categorization of Ranked Lists
Long lists of ranked items, such as Bloomberg Businessweek's rankings of MBA programs, are ubiquitous in Western culture, and they are often used in consumer decision making. Six studies show that consumers mentally subdivide ranked lists into a smaller set of categories and exaggerate differences between consecutive items adjacent to category boundaries. Further, despite prior work suggesting that people might subjectively produce place-value ca…
Is Eco-Friendly Unmanly? The Green-Feminine Stereotype and Its Effect on Sustainable Consumption
Why are men less likely than women to embrace environmentally friendly products and behaviors? Whereas prior research attributes this gender gap in sustainable consumption to personality differences between the sexes, we propose that it may also partially stem from a prevalent association between green behavior and femininity, and a corresponding stereotype (held by both men and women) that green consumers are more feminine. Building on prior fin…
The Top-Ten Effect: Consumers' Subjective Categorization of Ranked Lists
Long lists of ranked items, such as Bloomberg Businessweek's rankings of MBA programs, are ubiquitous in Western culture, and they are often used in consumer decision making. Six studies show that consumers mentally subdivide ranked lists into a smaller set of categories and exaggerate differences between consecutive items adjacent to category boundaries. Further, despite prior work suggesting that people might subjectively produce place-value ca…
Judging a Part by the Size of Its Whole: The Category Size Bias in Probability Judgments
Whereas prior research has found that consumers' probability judgments are sensitive to the number of categories into which a set of possible outcomes is grouped, this article demonstrates that categorization can also bias predictions when the number of categories is fixed. Specifically, five experiments document a category size bias in which consumers perceive an outcome as more likely to occur when it is categorized with many rather than few al…
Trust Does Beget Trustworthiness and Also Begets Trust in Others
Social scientists widely believe that trust begets trustworthiness, meaning that persons reward actions that they view as expressing trust. But evidence from the trust game (also known as the investment game)—introduced by Berg, Dickhaut, and McCabe and frequently used to test this relationship—is surprisingly inconclusive. The present article therefore reexamines this hypothesis (Experiment 1), using the trust game but incorporating mediation an…
Beyond Skepticism: Can Accessing Persuasion Knowledge Bolster Credibility
As defined by Friestad and Wright (1994), “persuasion knowledge” is personal knowledge about persuasion attempts that consumers develop and use whenever they believe they are targets of persuasion. A significant majority of research on persuasion knowledge has suggested that persuasion knowledge and skepticism invariably go hand in hand, and that accessing persuasion knowledge therefore leads consumers to evaluate the agent and its offering less …
Judging a Part by the Size of Its Whole: The Category Size Bias in Probability Judgments
Whereas prior research has found that consumers' probability judgments are sensitive to the number of categories into which a set of possible outcomes is grouped, this article demonstrates that categorization can also bias predictions when the number of categories is fixed. Specifically, five experiments document a category size bias in which consumers perceive an outcome as more likely to occur when it is categorized with many rather than few al…
The Top-Ten Effect: Consumers' Subjective Categorization of Ranked Lists
Long lists of ranked items, such as Bloomberg Businessweek's rankings of MBA programs, are ubiquitous in Western culture, and they are often used in consumer decision making. Six studies show that consumers mentally subdivide ranked lists into a smaller set of categories and exaggerate differences between consecutive items adjacent to category boundaries. Further, despite prior work suggesting that people might subjectively produce place-value ca…
Beyond Skepticism: Can Accessing Persuasion Knowledge Bolster Credibility
As defined by Friestad and Wright (1994), “persuasion knowledge” is personal knowledge about persuasion attempts that consumers develop and use whenever they believe they are targets of persuasion. A significant majority of research on persuasion knowledge has suggested that persuasion knowledge and skepticism invariably go hand in hand, and that accessing persuasion knowledge therefore leads consumers to evaluate the agent and its offering less …
Is Eco-Friendly Unmanly? The Green-Feminine Stereotype and Its Effect on Sustainable Consumption
Why are men less likely than women to embrace environmentally friendly products and behaviors? Whereas prior research attributes this gender gap in sustainable consumption to personality differences between the sexes, we propose that it may also partially stem from a prevalent association between green behavior and femininity, and a corresponding stereotype (held by both men and women) that green consumers are more feminine. Building on prior fin…
The Downside of Divinity? Reputational Harm to Sectarian Universities from Overtly Religious Advertising
The present research explores whether the use of overtly religious advertising by a sectarian university affects its academic reputation. The authors propose that individuals assume universities that engage in more (vs. less) overt religious advertising devote a greater proportion of their institutional resources toward religious education. Further, they posit that individuals exhibit zero-sum thinking about resource allocation whereby they belie…
The Perfection Premium
This research documents a perfection premium in evaluative judgments wherein individuals disproportionately reward perfection on an attribute compared to near-perfect values on the same attribute. For example, individuals consider a student who earns a perfect score of 36 on the American College Test to be more intelligent than a student who earns a near-perfect 35, and this difference in perceived intelligence is significantly greater than the d…
Trust Does Beget Trustworthiness and Also Begets Trust in Others
Social scientists widely believe that trust begets trustworthiness, meaning that persons reward actions that they view as expressing trust. But evidence from the trust game (also known as the investment game)—introduced by Berg, Dickhaut, and McCabe and frequently used to test this relationship—is surprisingly inconclusive. The present article therefore reexamines this hypothesis (Experiment 1), using the trust game but incorporating mediation an…
Anxiety, Cognitive Availability, and the Talisman Effect of Insurance
Across four experiments ( N = 1,923), this research provides converging evidence of a talisman effect of insurance—consumers who have an insurance policy feel that the covered mishap is less likely to occur. Although such an effect has previously been proposed, empirical evidence for it is limited, in part because the talisman effect has often been conflated with a related but distinct magical-thinking phenomenon, the tempting-fate effect. By dis…
Affective debiasing: Focusing on emotion during consumption attenuates attribute framing effects
One of the most pervasive findings in attribute framing research is the valence consistent shift; that is, positively valenced frames (e.g., 95% natural ingredients) are preferred over semantically equivalent but negatively valenced frames (e.g., 5% artificial ingredients). Despite the robustness of this finding, it has primarily been observed in judgments of prospective or hypothetical consumption. When valenced frames are presented during or im…
To err is human: Bias salience can help overcome resistance to medical AI
Invisible Rankings: When Do Consumers Assume Best-to-Worst Ordinality When Choosing from an Unnumbered List?
Consumers frequently use lists that were created by marketers, experts, or media platforms, such as a list of favorite restaurants. The authors refer to such lists as curated lists because they include items that appear to be endorsed or recommended by the list maker. Although these lists are typically ranked and numbered, marketers sometimes create lists that are not numbered, making it unclear whether the items have been ranked. Twelve studies …
Limiting Accessibility: How Targeting Consumers with Disabilities Constrains Acceptable Prices for Innovations
People with disabilities constitute 15% of the world’s population with a total disposable income of more than $2.6 trillion. However, few companies offer products tailored to the needs of this segment, making it important to understand how mass-market consumers react to innovations that target people with disabilities. Nine studies and six supplementary studies (twelve preregistered) reveal that innovations targeting consumers with disabilities a…
Psychology (10 works) · Social Psychology (10 works) · Decision-Making and Behavioral Economics (6 works) · Cognitive psychology (4 works) · Computer Science (4 works) · Cognition (3 works) · Consumer Behavior in Brand Consumption and Identification (3 works) · Political science (3 works) · Psychology of Moral and Emotional Judgment (3 works) · Advertising (2 works)