Knowledge that Transforms

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 overview of trends in topics, methods, and samples featured in JCR’s pages. Both appear in this issue. Further, we have curated a special virtual issue of JCR that contains some of the most impactful papers published in JCR (based on an analysis of Web of Science citations conducted in January 2015), one for each year it has been published. It will appear on JCR’s Oxford University website. To complement this quantified look at trends and articles over time, we elicited input from former editors of the journal. A few, of course, are deceased, and some were not available for comment. However, 12 of the 17 individuals who once edited or co-edited JCR were able and willing to provide input. Table 1 provides the names of all past JCR editors and the years they served.

At every waking moment, one’s mode of attention is situated at some point on a spectrum ranging from experiencing, where attention is directed toward perceptions and cognitions related to the immediate physical environment, to mind-wandering, where attention is directed toward thoughts, feelings, and daydreams that are decoupled from the environment. Across five studies, the authors propose and find that people in an experiencing (vs. mind-wandering) mode place more importance on detecting change in their environment, which leads them to prioritize attention toward changeable stimuli (like price) and subsequently afford such stimuli greater weight in judgments and decisions. The research not only uncovers a novel stimuli characteristic—changeability—important in both the domain of attention modes and judgments but also diverges from the typical characterization of price as a salient cue or heuristic to generate a unique set of findings based on price’s inherently changeable nature. More broadly, the findings highlight a way in which consumers’ fundamental judgment and decision-making processes are shaped by cognitive mechanisms designed for the physical world.

Prior research indicates that a stimulus can reinforce an action if the stimulus is a reward (i.e., a priori positive) or carries useful information. The current research finds that if a stimulus is perceived as a reaction to an action, it can reinforce the action even if the stimulus is a priori nonpositive and noninformative. Mere reactions are reinforcing. Specifically, eight experiments, including a field experiment, demonstrate that individuals are more likely to repeat an action (e.g., inserting money in a donation box or typing a message in a textbox) if the action is followed by a stimulus (e.g., the emission of a sound or the flash of an image) than if it is not, even if the stimulus is a priori negative (e.g., an annoying sound or an aversive image) and carries no useful information. Moreover, the effect just described will occur only if the stimulus is contingent on (immediately follows) the action and perceived as a reaction to the action. Finally, by serving as a reaction, an a priori nonpositive stimulus can become positive. The present work yields theoretical implications for stimulus–response relationships and practical implications for designs of consumer products and loyalty programs.

Decision making often entails conflict. In many situations, the symptoms of such decisional conflict are conspicuous. This article explores an important and unexamined question: How does observing someone else experiencing decisional conflict impact our own preferences? The authors show that observing others’ emotional conflict and agony over an impending decision makes the observer’s preferences converge to those of the conflicted actor (i.e., choose similarly). Thus this article contributes to the social influence literature by demonstrating that observers’ preferences are not only influenced by an actor’s ultimate choice, but also by the process leading to this choice. For example, in one experiment, participants’ real monetary donations to one of two charities converged to those of a paid confederate who agonized over the decision. Six studies demonstrate this effect and show that it is triggered by empathy and a greater sense of shared identity with the conflicted actor. Accordingly, the studies show the effect is more pronounced for individuals with a greater tendency to empathize with others, and that convergence occurs only if participants deem the actor’s conflict warranted given the decision at hand. The authors also demonstrate important implications of this effect in contexts of group decision making.

The Journal of Consumer Research has completed four decades as one of the top journals in the larger field of marketing as well as the premier outlet for research on consumer behavior. This elite status is based, in part, on its stated objective as a multidisciplinary journal that allows for a variety of topics, methods, and populations that are central to collectives of scholars from many social sciences and methodological orientations. While a few articles have reviewed the level of diversity within the journal and among its peers, none to date has taken an expansive look at what is studied, how it is examined, and which consumers are used to determine the validity of our theoretical contributions. Thus this article looks across the life span of JCR to address these issues and finds considerable progress along with major areas that should be addressed by the community of researchers that constitutes our field.

Extant research on cobranding does not examine when and why complementarity or similarity between cobranding partners can be more effective. This research examines consumers’ reactions to cobranded partnerships that feature brands with either complementary or similar attribute levels, both of which are common in the marketplace. The results of six experiments show that consumers’ evaluations vary as a function of concept combination interpretation strategy (property mapping or relational linking) and whether cobranded partners have complementary or similar attributes. Specifically, when consumers use property mapping, they evaluate cobranded partnerships with complementary (vs. similar) attribute levels more favorably. In contrast, when using relational linking, they evaluate cobranded partnerships with complementary (vs. similar) attribute levels less favorably. The results also reveal that the breadth of the host brand (broad vs. narrow) and the type of advertising influence the extent to which consumers are likely to use property mapping or relational linking in evaluating cobranded partnerships.