Vicki Morwitz
Biographic Data
| ID | 98688 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Vicki Morwitz |
| GIVEN NAMES | Vicki |
| FAMILY NAME | Morwitz |
| SIGNATURE | MORWITZ V |
| AFFILIATIONS | Ozgun Atasoy ([email protected]) is a postdoctoral research associate in the department of marketing of the Faculty of Business and Economics at the University of Basel, Peter Merian-Weg 6, CH-4052 Basel, Switzerland. Carey K. Morewedge ([email protected]) is a professor of marketing in the Questrom School of Business at Boston University, Rafik B. Hariri Building, 595 Commonwealth Avenue, Boston, MA 02215 |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 48 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 419 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 6 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 42 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2001 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2019 |
| H-INDEX | 11 |
When an Hour Feels Shorter
Consumers often organize their time by scheduling various tasks, but also leave some time unaccounted for. The authors examine whether ending an interval of unaccounted time with an upcoming task systematically alters how this time is perceived and consumed. Eight studies conducted in both the lab and field show that bounded intervals of time (e.g., an hour before a scheduled meeting) feel prospectively shorter than unbounded intervals of time (e…
Cutting through Content Clutter
Consumer-to-consumer brand message sharing is pivotal for effective social media marketing. Even as companies join social media conversations and generate millions of brand messages, it remains unclear what, how, and when brand messages stand out and prompt sharing by consumers. With a conceptual extension of speech act theory, this study offers a granular assessment of brands’ message intentions (i.e., assertive, expressive, or directive) and th…
Service with Emoticons
Virtually no research has examined the role of emoticons in commercial relationships, and research outside the marketing domain reports mixed findings. This article aims to resolve these mixed findings by considering that emoticon senders are often simultaneously evaluated on two fundamental dimensions, warmth and competence, and the accessibility of one dimension over the other is critically contingent on salient relationship norms (communal vs.…
Money Helps When Money Feels
Across five studies, the current research demonstrates that imbuing money with humanlike characteristics can enhance charitable giving. Based on mind perception theory, we propose that anthropomorphizing money can induce people to attribute to money the capacity to feel and sense (i.e., warmth) and the capacity to do things (i.e., competence). Further, we argue that enhanced warmth perception increases charitable giving. Studies 1a and 1b provide…
When Moderation Fosters Persuasion
When people seek to persuade others to purchase a particular product or service, they often give an extremely favorable review of it as a means of doing so. Despite the intuitive appeal of this strategy, the current research demonstrates that a moderately positive review is sometimes more persuasive. In particular, when the perceived default evaluation in a given context is extremely positive, moderately positive reviews that deviate from that de…
Multistage Decision Processes
With the ever-increasing number of options from which consumers can choose, many decisions are made in stages. Whether using decision tools to sort, screen, and eliminate options, or intuitively trying to reduce the complexity of a choice, consumers often reach a decision by making sequential, attribute-level choices. The current article explores how the order in which attribute-level choices are made in such multistage decisions affects how cons…
Mind the Gap
Consumers often encounter product-related numerical information, such as attribute ratings and version numbers. This research demonstrates that a smaller (compared to a larger) numerical difference can increase perceived improvement and enhance product appeal. We find that when a product’s version number or rating changes from a decimal number to an integer (e.g., 2.4 to 3), product appeal is enhanced compared to when the change is between two in…
When Feeling Younger Depends on Others
How do social cues in the immediate environment affect older consumers' tendency to feel younger? And what is the impact of this tendency on consumption? This research investigates the malleability of older consumers' feel-age and the underlying mechanisms by focusing on the influence of contextual social cues and the downstream effects on consumption behavior. Five studies provide evidence that the mere presence of young social cues triggers an …
Deciding Who Gets What, Fairly
Goods and services are often allocated to those who spend the most resources. In many cases, this results in allocation to people who spend the most money. But people can use a variety of other resources to acquire things (e.g., time, effort, social capital). Why might some resources seem fairer to use than others? In this research, we show that people believe resources systematically differ according to how well they signal preferences (e.g., mo…
Emotional Ability and Associative Learning
We extend evaluative conditioning research by examining how differences in emotional ability impact implicit and explicit attitude formation from conditioning. Across five studies, the ability to experience emotional information enhanced the valence of implicit attitudes toward a conditioned stimulus (CS). Conversely, the ability to reason about emotional information reduced the impact of implicit CS attitudes on subsequent explicit evaluations. …
Apples, Oranges, and Erasers
When deciding whether to buy an item, consumers sometimes think about other ways they could spend their money. Past research has explored how increasing the salience of outside options (i.e., alternatives not immediately available in the choice set) influences purchase decisions, but whether the type of alternative considered systematically affects buying behavior remains an open question. Ten studies find that relative to considering alternative…
Humor, Comedy, and Consumer Behavior
Consumers regularly experience humor while buying and using products, procuring services, and engaging in various consumption experiences, whether watching a movie or dining with colleagues. Despite an expansive literature on how humor influences advertisers’ communication goals, far less is known about how humor appreciation and comedy production influence the likelihood of attaining various consumption goals, from experiencing pleasure and maki…
When Consumers Prefer to Give Material Gifts Instead of Experiences
Although previous research suggests that there are hedonic and interpersonal benefits to gifting experiences, consumers often give material gifts rather than experiential gifts. Exploring this mismatch, the current research examines when and why consumers prefer to give material versus experiential gifts. The authors propose that gift givers are more likely to give experiential gifts to socially close recipients than socially distant recipients. …
Minions for the Rich? Financial Status Changes How Consumers See Products with Anthropomorphic Features
The present research explores how financial status, which influences consumers’ expectations about how companies will treat them, affects consumers’ perceptions and assessments of products that have been given anthropomorphic features by companies. Studies 1 and 2 showed that participants with higher financial status expect more favorable treatment from a humanized entity (e.g., “a self-driving car would prioritize the well-being of the rich over…
Goods Donations Increase Charitable Credit for Low-Warmth Donors
Low-warmth actors are often assumed to lack communal (or other-oriented) intentions, even when acting generously. Low-warmth donors must therefore send stronger signals of their communal intent when donating to receive the same amount of charitable credit as high-warmth donors. Because goods are linked with communal norms, we find that donating goods allows low-warmth donors to signal communal intent and increase charitable credit received. Study…
Dissociating Controllable and Uncontrollable Effects of Affective Stimuli on Attitudes and Consumption
This research studies a fundamental and seemingly straightforward question: Can basic advertising elements, such as the presence of attractive imagery, have uncontrollable effects on consumers’ attitudes and consumption decisions? Answering this question is methodologically challenging, because the presence of an uncontrollable process can be masked by a simultaneously operating controllable process. We argue first that existing methods conflate …
Not My Type
Why are people often uncomfortable dealing with financial decisions? We propose that people perceive financial decisions—more so than decisions in many other equally complex and important domains—as compatible with a cold, analytical mode of thinking and as highly incompatible with feelings and emotions. Consequently, the more people perceive themselves as inclined to rely on affect in their decisions, the more they experience self-concept incong…
Other People's Money
Nine studies find that people believe their money has greater purchasing power than the same quantity of others' money. Using a variety of products from socks to clocks to chocolates, we found that participants thought the same amount of money could buy more when it belonged to themselves versus others-a pattern that extended to undesirable products. Participants also believed their money-in the form of donations, taxes, fines, and fees-would hel…
Culture, Relationship Norms, and Dual Entitlement
According to the dual entitlement principle, consumers find it fair for firms to price asymmetrically to cost changes-that is, for firms to increase prices when costs increase but maintain prices when costs decrease. However, a meta-analysis reveals asymmetric pricing is less prevalent in collectivistic (vs. individualistic) countries (study 1). We propose a fairness-based explanation, demonstrating that interdependent consumers in collectivistic…
Increasing the Power of Your Study by Increasing the Effect Size
As in other social sciences, published findings in consumer research tend to overestimate the size of the effect being investigated, due to both file drawer effects and abuse of researcher degrees of freedom, including opportunistic analysis decisions. Given that most effect sizes are substantially smaller than would be apparent from published research, there has been a widespread call to increase power by increasing sample size. We propose that,…
Stranger Danger
While joint ethical violations are fairly common in the marketplace and in workplace, sports-team, and academic settings, little research has studied such collaborative wrongdoings. This work compares the joint ethical decisions of pairs of people (i.e., dyads) to those of individual decision makers. Four experiments demonstrate that dyads in which the partners do not share a social bond with each other behave less ethically than individuals do. …
Digital Goods Are Valued Less Than Physical Goods
Digital goods are, in many cases, substantive innovations relative to their physical counterparts. Yet, in five experiments, people ascribed less value to digital than to physical versions of the same good. Research participants paid more for, were willing to pay more for, and were more likely to purchase physical goods than equivalent digital goods, including souvenir photographs, books (fiction and nonfiction), and films. Participants valued ph…
When Public Recognition for Charitable Giving Backfires
This research examines the effectiveness of public recognition in encouraging charitable giving, demonstrating that public recognition can sometimes decrease donations. While previous work has largely shown that making donations visible to others can motivate donors, the present research shows that the effectiveness of public recognition depends on whether potential donors are under an independent (i.e., separate from others) or interdependent (i…
Feeling Economically Stuck
Five studies provide converging evidence for the joint effect of perceived economic mobility and socioeconomic status (SES) on compensatory behavior, such that low SES consumers who perceive low economic mobility (i.e., economically stuck consumers) seek more variety than other consumers. We trace this effect to these consumers' desire to compensate for their low sense of personal control. Furthermore, we show that these consumers' variety-seekin…
Facing Dominance
A product's front face (e.g., a watch face or car front) is typically the first point of contact and a key determinant of a consumer's initial impression about the product. Drawing on evolutionary accounts of human face perception suggesting that the face width-to-height ratio (fWHR: bizygomatic width divided by upper-face height) can signal dominance and affect its overall evaluation, this research is based on the premise that product faces are …
Single-Paper Meta-Analysis
A typical behavioral research paper features multiple studies of a common phenomenon that are analyzed solely in isolation. Because the studies are of a common phenomenon, this practice is inefficient and forgoes important benefits that can be obtained only by analyzing them jointly in a single-paper meta-analysis (SPM). To facilitate SPM, we introduce meta-analytic methodology that is user-friendly, widely applicable, and specially tailored to t…
Asking Questions with Reflexive Focus
Interviews have been a key primary data source for research published in the Journal of Consumer Research. This tutorial aims to walk readers through the design and execution of interview-based empirical research on consumers and consumption
Penny Wise and Pound Foolish
Through five experiments, we provide a cognitive account of when and why nine-ending prices are perceived to be smaller than a price one cent higher. First, this occurs only when the leftmost digits of the prices differ (e.g., $2.99 vs. $3.00). Second, the left-digit effect also depends on the numerical and psychological distances between the target price and a competing product's price. The closer the two prices being compared, the more likely i…
Withholding Consumption
This article draws on social dilemma theory and reference group theory to understand the individual boycott decision and tests the predictions stemming from this conceptualization in two experiments. Consistent with our predictions, consumers' likelihood of participating in both economic and social-issue boycotts is jointly determined by their perceptions of the boycott's likelihood of success, their susceptibility to normative social influences,…
Crowdsourcing Consumer Research
Data collection in consumer research has progressively moved away from traditional samples (e.g., university undergraduates) and toward Internet samples. In the last complete volume of the Journal of Consumer Research (June 2015-April 2016), 43% of behavioral studies were conducted on the crowdsourcing website Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk). The option to crowdsource empirical investigations has great efficiency benefits for both individual resea…
Increasing the Power of Your Study by Increasing the Effect Size
As in other social sciences, published findings in consumer research tend to overestimate the size of the effect being investigated, due to both file drawer effects and abuse of researcher degrees of freedom, including opportunistic analysis decisions. Given that most effect sizes are substantially smaller than would be apparent from published research, there has been a widespread call to increase power by increasing sample size. We propose that,…
Keeping It Real in Experimental Research-Understanding When, Where, and How to Enhance Realism and Measure Consumer Behavior
In this article, we consider why employing realistic experimental designs and measuring actual behavior is important and beneficial for consumer research. More specifically, we discuss when, where, and how researchers might go about doing this in order to increase the veracity and believability of their work. We analyze the choice of independent variables (IVs) along the experimental-realism dimension, ranging from artificial to realistic, and th…
Digital Goods Are Valued Less Than Physical Goods
Digital goods are, in many cases, substantive innovations relative to their physical counterparts. Yet, in five experiments, people ascribed less value to digital than to physical versions of the same good. Research participants paid more for, were willing to pay more for, and were more likely to purchase physical goods than equivalent digital goods, including souvenir photographs, books (fiction and nonfiction), and films. Participants valued ph…
MTurk Character Misrepresentation
This tutorial provides evidence that character misrepresentation in survey screeners by Amazon Mechanical Turk Workers ("Turkers") can substantially and significantly distort research findings. Using five studies, we demonstrate that a large proportion of respondents in paid MTurk studies claim a false identity, ownership, or activity in order to qualify for a study. The extent of misrepresentation can be unacceptably high, and the responses to s…
Service with Emoticons
Virtually no research has examined the role of emoticons in commercial relationships, and research outside the marketing domain reports mixed findings. This article aims to resolve these mixed findings by considering that emoticon senders are often simultaneously evaluated on two fundamental dimensions, warmth and competence, and the accessibility of one dimension over the other is critically contingent on salient relationship norms (communal vs.…
Cutting through Content Clutter
Consumer-to-consumer brand message sharing is pivotal for effective social media marketing. Even as companies join social media conversations and generate millions of brand messages, it remains unclear what, how, and when brand messages stand out and prompt sharing by consumers. With a conceptual extension of speech act theory, this study offers a granular assessment of brands’ message intentions (i.e., assertive, expressive, or directive) and th…
Blue and Red Voices
Political ideology plays a pivotal role in shaping individuals' attitudes, opinions, and behaviors. However, apart from a handful of studies, little is known about how consumers' political ideology affects their marketplace behavior. The authors used three large consumer complaint databases from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, and Federal Communications Commission in conjunction with a cou…
Dissociating Controllable and Uncontrollable Effects of Affective Stimuli on Attitudes and Consumption
This research studies a fundamental and seemingly straightforward question: Can basic advertising elements, such as the presence of attractive imagery, have uncontrollable effects on consumers’ attitudes and consumption decisions? Answering this question is methodologically challenging, because the presence of an uncontrollable process can be masked by a simultaneously operating controllable process. We argue first that existing methods conflate …
The interplay of health claims and taste importance on food consumption and self-reported satiety
Feeling Economically Stuck
Five studies provide converging evidence for the joint effect of perceived economic mobility and socioeconomic status (SES) on compensatory behavior, such that low SES consumers who perceive low economic mobility (i.e., economically stuck consumers) seek more variety than other consumers. We trace this effect to these consumers' desire to compensate for their low sense of personal control. Furthermore, we show that these consumers' variety-seekin…
I Want to Know the Answer! Give Me Fish 'n' Chips
This research examines how incidentally induced consumer curiosity influences subsequent indulgent decisions. Prior research has primarily focused on the effect of curiosity on information seeking in the present domain. The current research goes further to propose that the curiosity effect can spill over to prompt consumers to prefer indulgent options in other, unrelated domains (e.g., food, money). This situation is likely to occur because curio…
Delegating Decisions
Consumers typically prefer freedom of choice, but when faced with a choice they might regret, they may prefer freedom from choice. Eight experiments show that people delegate difficult decisions, regardless of the decision’s importance, and regardless of their potential surrogate’s expertise. Delegation stems from a desire to avoid responsibility for potentially making the wrong choice rather than simply the desire to avoid the possibility of a p…
When Feeling Younger Depends on Others
How do social cues in the immediate environment affect older consumers' tendency to feel younger? And what is the impact of this tendency on consumption? This research investigates the malleability of older consumers' feel-age and the underlying mechanisms by focusing on the influence of contextual social cues and the downstream effects on consumption behavior. Five studies provide evidence that the mere presence of young social cues triggers an …
Emotional Ability and Associative Learning
We extend evaluative conditioning research by examining how differences in emotional ability impact implicit and explicit attitude formation from conditioning. Across five studies, the ability to experience emotional information enhanced the valence of implicit attitudes toward a conditioned stimulus (CS). Conversely, the ability to reason about emotional information reduced the impact of implicit CS attitudes on subsequent explicit evaluations. …
Other People's Money
Nine studies find that people believe their money has greater purchasing power than the same quantity of others' money. Using a variety of products from socks to clocks to chocolates, we found that participants thought the same amount of money could buy more when it belonged to themselves versus others-a pattern that extended to undesirable products. Participants also believed their money-in the form of donations, taxes, fines, and fees-would hel…
Culture, Relationship Norms, and Dual Entitlement
According to the dual entitlement principle, consumers find it fair for firms to price asymmetrically to cost changes-that is, for firms to increase prices when costs increase but maintain prices when costs decrease. However, a meta-analysis reveals asymmetric pricing is less prevalent in collectivistic (vs. individualistic) countries (study 1). We propose a fairness-based explanation, demonstrating that interdependent consumers in collectivistic…
How to Study Consciousness in Consumer Research, A Commentary on Williams and Poehlman
Consumer research can benefit greatly from more insight into unconscious processes underlying behavior. Williams and Poehlman’s effort at more clearly conceptualizing consciousness and call for more research provides a welcome stimulus in this regard. At the same time, providing evidence for unconscious causation is fraught with methodological difficulties. We outline why it is vital to uphold standards of evidence for claims regarding unconsciou…
Cultivating Optimism
Research shows that optimism can positively impact health, but when and why people feel optimistic when confronting health challenges is less clear. Findings from six studies show that the frames people adopt when thinking about health challenges influence their optimism about overcoming those challenges, and that their culture moderates this effect. In cultures where the independent self is highly accessible, individuals adopting an initiator fr…
When Consumers Prefer to Give Material Gifts Instead of Experiences
Although previous research suggests that there are hedonic and interpersonal benefits to gifting experiences, consumers often give material gifts rather than experiential gifts. Exploring this mismatch, the current research examines when and why consumers prefer to give material versus experiential gifts. The authors propose that gift givers are more likely to give experiential gifts to socially close recipients than socially distant recipients. …
Minions for the Rich? Financial Status Changes How Consumers See Products with Anthropomorphic Features
The present research explores how financial status, which influences consumers’ expectations about how companies will treat them, affects consumers’ perceptions and assessments of products that have been given anthropomorphic features by companies. Studies 1 and 2 showed that participants with higher financial status expect more favorable treatment from a humanized entity (e.g., “a self-driving car would prioritize the well-being of the rich over…
Withholding Consumption
This article draws on social dilemma theory and reference group theory to understand the individual boycott decision and tests the predictions stemming from this conceptualization in two experiments. Consistent with our predictions, consumers' likelihood of participating in both economic and social-issue boycotts is jointly determined by their perceptions of the boycott's likelihood of success, their susceptibility to normative social influences,…
Penny Wise and Pound Foolish
Through five experiments, we provide a cognitive account of when and why nine-ending prices are perceived to be smaller than a price one cent higher. First, this occurs only when the leftmost digits of the prices differ (e.g., $2.99 vs. $3.00). Second, the left-digit effect also depends on the numerical and psychological distances between the target price and a competing product's price. The closer the two prices being compared, the more likely i…
The interplay of health claims and taste importance on food consumption and self-reported satiety
JCR Updates
We would like to keep the JCR community updated on some logistical issues. In the last year, JCR has undergone many transitions: new editors (us!), a new managing editor (Vladimir Dovijarov), and now, a new publisher (Oxford University Press). In fact, you may have noticed our “new look” if you have recently received a hard-copy version of the journal. We want to take this opportunity to thank our former managing editor, Mary-Ann Twist, for many …
The Evolution of JCR
JCR’s 40th anniversary creates an opportunity to take a historical look at its evolution, in order to better appreciate both its historical trajectory and the challenges it will need to reckon with in the future. To this end, Shane Wang, Neil Bendle, Feng Mai, and June Cotte have undertaken an analysis of the journal’s trends in topics, of impactful papers, and of top contributing scholars. Justine Rapp and Ron Hill provide a complementary overvi…
A Field Guide for the Review Process
The peer review process––both writing reviews for academic journals and responding to reviews of one’s own work––is fundamental to building scientific knowledge. In this article, we explain why you should invest time reviewing, how to write a constructive review, and how to respond effectively to reviews of your own work
Tutorials in Consumer Research
We are excited to launch a new initiative at JCR called “Tutorials in Consumer Research.” The goal of this initiative is to provide valuable how-to information for potential authors. We hope to help both junior scholars, including PhD students, and more established scholars who simply lack rigorous training or up-to-date knowledge in particular areas, to learn aspects of the art and craft of doing research that has the potential to be published i…
Consumers (and Consumer Researchers) Need Conscious Thinking in Addition to Unconscious Processes
We suggest consumer research develop an integrative approach that favors neither unconscious nor conscious processes but rather appreciates the contributions and limitations of both, and how they work together. We agree that unconscious processes precede all conscious ones, but we argue that conscious thinking plays a prominent and likely indispensible role in much of consumer behavior. Conscious thought is particularly useful for logical reasoni…
An Interdisciplinary Lens on Consciousness
We welcome Williams and Poehlman’s (this issue) effort to better conceptualize consciousness in consumer research. In this comment, our goal is to complement their ideas based on models and methods from cognitive and consumer neuroscience. We extend their suggestions in two important ways. First, we offer an extended framework based on a taxonomy of consciousness from visual neuroscience that suggests a continuum rather than a dichotomy between u…
How to Study Consciousness in Consumer Research, A Commentary on Williams and Poehlman
Consumer research can benefit greatly from more insight into unconscious processes underlying behavior. Williams and Poehlman’s effort at more clearly conceptualizing consciousness and call for more research provides a welcome stimulus in this regard. At the same time, providing evidence for unconscious causation is fraught with methodological difficulties. We outline why it is vital to uphold standards of evidence for claims regarding unconsciou…
Retracted
This article has been retracted. Please see: https://doi.org/10.1093/jcr/ucaa039
Asking Questions with Reflexive Focus
Interviews have been a key primary data source for research published in the Journal of Consumer Research. This tutorial aims to walk readers through the design and execution of interview-based empirical research on consumers and consumption
The Politics of Buying, Boycotting, Complaining, and Disputing
Research in political psychology indicates that liberals are less motivated than conservatives by epistemic, existential, and relational needs to reduce uncertainty, threat, and social discord, and are therefore more prone to challenge the status quo. In a compelling extension of this work into the field of consumer behavior, Jung, Garbarino, Briley, and Wynhausen (this issue) demonstrate that people residing in more liberal (vs. conservative) ar…
Cultivating Optimism
Research shows that optimism can positively impact health, but when and why people feel optimistic when confronting health challenges is less clear. Findings from six studies show that the frames people adopt when thinking about health challenges influence their optimism about overcoming those challenges, and that their culture moderates this effect. In cultures where the independent self is highly accessible, individuals adopting an initiator fr…
MTurk Character Misrepresentation
This tutorial provides evidence that character misrepresentation in survey screeners by Amazon Mechanical Turk Workers ("Turkers") can substantially and significantly distort research findings. Using five studies, we demonstrate that a large proportion of respondents in paid MTurk studies claim a false identity, ownership, or activity in order to qualify for a study. The extent of misrepresentation can be unacceptably high, and the responses to s…
Keeping It Real in Experimental Research-Understanding When, Where, and How to Enhance Realism and Measure Consumer Behavior
In this article, we consider why employing realistic experimental designs and measuring actual behavior is important and beneficial for consumer research. More specifically, we discuss when, where, and how researchers might go about doing this in order to increase the veracity and believability of their work. We analyze the choice of independent variables (IVs) along the experimental-realism dimension, ranging from artificial to realistic, and th…
Crowdsourcing Consumer Research
Data collection in consumer research has progressively moved away from traditional samples (e.g., university undergraduates) and toward Internet samples. In the last complete volume of the Journal of Consumer Research (June 2015-April 2016), 43% of behavioral studies were conducted on the crowdsourcing website Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk). The option to crowdsource empirical investigations has great efficiency benefits for both individual resea…
Round Off the Bargaining
This research shows that making a precise (vs. round) offer in a negotiation may lead to diverging outcomes. On the one hand, past literature has demonstrated a precision advantage wherein offer precision reduces the amount by which offer recipients counter. On the other hand, building on the notion that round numbers symbolize completion and previous findings that individuals tend to set goals at round numbers, we hypothesize a roundness advanta…
Blue and Red Voices
Political ideology plays a pivotal role in shaping individuals' attitudes, opinions, and behaviors. However, apart from a handful of studies, little is known about how consumers' political ideology affects their marketplace behavior. The authors used three large consumer complaint databases from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, and Federal Communications Commission in conjunction with a cou…
Single-Paper Meta-Analysis
A typical behavioral research paper features multiple studies of a common phenomenon that are analyzed solely in isolation. Because the studies are of a common phenomenon, this practice is inefficient and forgoes important benefits that can be obtained only by analyzing them jointly in a single-paper meta-analysis (SPM). To facilitate SPM, we introduce meta-analytic methodology that is user-friendly, widely applicable, and specially tailored to t…
Conceptualizing Consciousness in Consumer Research
An outsized focus on the explanatory value of conscious thought can constrain opportunities to more rigorously examine the influence of less obvious drivers of consumer behavior. This article proposes a more precise, disaggregated, and minimized perspective on consciousness, distinguishing it from other higher-order mental processes (i.e., deliberation, intentionality, control, and effort). A more circumscribed perspective on consciousness, we ar…
When Moderation Fosters Persuasion
When people seek to persuade others to purchase a particular product or service, they often give an extremely favorable review of it as a means of doing so. Despite the intuitive appeal of this strategy, the current research demonstrates that a moderately positive review is sometimes more persuasive. In particular, when the perceived default evaluation in a given context is extremely positive, moderately positive reviews that deviate from that de…
Multistage Decision Processes
With the ever-increasing number of options from which consumers can choose, many decisions are made in stages. Whether using decision tools to sort, screen, and eliminate options, or intuitively trying to reduce the complexity of a choice, consumers often reach a decision by making sequential, attribute-level choices. The current article explores how the order in which attribute-level choices are made in such multistage decisions affects how cons…
Mind the Gap
Consumers often encounter product-related numerical information, such as attribute ratings and version numbers. This research demonstrates that a smaller (compared to a larger) numerical difference can increase perceived improvement and enhance product appeal. We find that when a product’s version number or rating changes from a decimal number to an integer (e.g., 2.4 to 3), product appeal is enhanced compared to when the change is between two in…
When Feeling Younger Depends on Others
How do social cues in the immediate environment affect older consumers' tendency to feel younger? And what is the impact of this tendency on consumption? This research investigates the malleability of older consumers' feel-age and the underlying mechanisms by focusing on the influence of contextual social cues and the downstream effects on consumption behavior. Five studies provide evidence that the mere presence of young social cues triggers an …
Psychology (41 works) · Social Psychology (32 works) · Computer Science (24 works) · Business (23 works) · Consumer Behavior in Brand Consumption and Identification (18 works) · Economics (18 works) · Marketing (14 works) · Behavioral Health and Interventions (13 works) · Decision-Making and Behavioral Economics (12 works) · Political science (12 works)