Knowledge that Transforms

Disability is a basic human condition that affects a significant proportion of the world’s population, yet many disability- and accessibility-relevant issues remain pressing and insufficiently addressed. With three experiments, the current research investigates potential reasons for why marketplace disability accessibility has not been universally accepted. Potential barriers to greater accessibility in marketplaces may arise because such efforts appear at odds with other salient priorities, at micro (i.e., consumer) and macro (i.e., firm, policy, or societal) levels. In the proposed framework and resulting experiments, micro-level trade-offs prompt perceptions of personal cost and macro-level trade-offs prompt perceptions of firm morality. In turn, these perceptions mediate firm evaluations, showing that consumers at baseline respond negatively to accessibility. Critically, however, several practical interventions emerge from these processes. Marketers can mitigate consumers’ negative responses to accessibility by employing simple framing choices such as emphasizing who benefits or noting what the purpose of the offering is. By demonstrating one way to better understand perceptions of the full spectrum of the consumer population, this research provides pathways for consumer researchers to further delve into disability-related research in the future.

Conspiracy theories pose risks to consumers, businesses, and society. The present research investigates the role of scientific literacy in a variety of conspiracy beliefs with implications for consumer well-being and sustainability (e.g., regarding coronavirus disease 2019 [COVID-19], genetically modified organisms, and climate change). In contrast to the mixed effects of education in prior work, we find that scientific literacy undermines conspiracy beliefs and, in turn, conspiracy-related behaviors. This finding is explained by people’s ability to use two dimensions of scientific literacy—scientific knowledge and reasoning—to accurately assess conspiracy evidence. For robustness, we assess scientific literacy through both measurement and manipulation (i.e., interventions), identify two moderators (evidence strength and narration) that attenuate the effect, and further validate our theorizing using national and international datasets (regarding COVID-19 vaccination and Google search, respectively). We discuss the implications of our findings for consumers, companies, nonprofit organizations, and governments.

This article chronicles the evolution of the two main paradigms within the Journal of Consumer Research: consumer information processing and behavioral decision-making. The work synthesizes interviews with preeminent scholars who have shaped these paradigms, featuring theoretical developments, key findings, and methodological innovations. This article also connects these perspectives to practical applications in advertising, branding, and retailing and identifies knowledge gaps to be addressed in future consumer research.

Many companies are levying mandatory surcharges on products to raise funds for socio-moral causes (e.g., carbon-offset, living-wage, fair-trade, and sustainability surcharges). Should these surcharges be presented separately from the product price (i.e., partitioned pricing) or combined with the product price (i.e., all-inclusive pricing)? This research argues that partitioned pricing for socio-moral surcharges can backfire. When socio-moral surcharges are partitioned, consumers feel that the company is avoiding its own responsibility toward the cause, reducing intrinsic corporate social responsibility attributions and consequently leading to adverse consumer reactions. This theorization is specific to surcharges attached to socio-moral causes; the effects reverse for non-socio-moral surcharges. Further, we document three ways via which firms can alter consumer beliefs and attenuate negative reactions. These include approaches that signal that the firm is not seeking reputational benefits, that the firm is not avoiding responsibility, and by shifting consumers’ focus from the costs they have to bear to the benefits they accrue. Hence, this research presents implications for managers and policymakers seeking to incorporate socio-moral surcharges into product prices while mitigating consumer backlash.

Given that the central objective of consumption in many contexts is to derive enjoyment or utility, it is reasonable to assume that how much people consume a product will primarily be driven by how much they like it. Yet, the current research finds that, although consumers indeed predict that they will consume a greater amount of options they like more, their actual consumption can be surprisingly insensitive to their preferences. Across six experiments, we find that consumers systematically overestimate the extent to which their consumption amount is determined by their preferences. We propose that how much people actually consume is determined by a variety of factors, including transient motivational states (e.g., hunger or boredom), consumption opportunities, and habits. Compared to these factors, however, people’s liking of a product tends to be more salient, better known, and perceived as a more normatively appropriate driver of consumption—leading consumers to focus overly on their preferences when predicting their consumption. We further propose that this prediction error has important implications for consumer welfare, as it can lead to suboptimal inventory decisions (e.g., over-purchasing of favorite products) as well as ineffective self-control strategies (e.g., restricting oneself to mediocre options in order to reduce consumption).

Consumers who socialize in online consumption communities sometimes become alarmingly hostile, toxic, and otherwise verbally violent toward one another—a phenomenon known in sociology as brutalization. Research indicates that short-lived, situational outbursts of verbal violence—such as gross insults, harassment, or trolling—are common in online consumption contexts. However, it does not explain why such behaviors sometimes become endemic, turning entire communities into toxic social spaces. To address this question, the authors studied 18 years of interactions in an online electronic dance music community. Their interpretive analysis reveals three constellations of interacting, mutually reinforcing, forms of direct, structural, and cultural violence—sadistic entertainment, clan warfare, and popular justice—that fuel community brutalization in distinct ways. This article introduces these brutalization constellations, substantiates them with empirical data, and discusses their implications for theories of violence in consumption communities as well as the wider social media sphere.

Recent decades have witnessed menopause, an inevitable and natural bodily transition, come under the purview of the market. Menopausal women are increasingly expected to be informed entrepreneurs of their bodies, bringing this transition within the domain of self-regulation and responsibility. Using data emanating from institutionalized market actors (i.e., pharmaceutical and insurance companies, healthcare professionals) and the accounts of consumers, we investigate the construction of responsibility in the contested field of menopause. We show that the formation of the responsible feminine consumer subject is an adjustive process generated through contestations between different articulations of subjectivity. Specifically, we identify three subject formative subprocesses and show how gender is implicated in each. Instead of following a singular path, these subprocesses culminate in two distinct yet coexisting routes to responsibilization, either by appealing to the qualities of traditional feminine subjectivity or by aligning with postfeminist subjectivity. We extend existing theorizations by revealing how gender shapes the processes of responsible subject formation and broadening the investigation of consumer responsibilization to a personal and embodied level.

This meta-meta-analysis study quantifies the development of scientific knowledge in consumer research by summarizing the findings of 222 meta-analyses that together include 2481 meta-analytic effect sizes. The results provide an overview of how much we know and how knowledge has developed in consumer research over time. By explaining 7.8% variance (r = 0.28) in consumer-relevant dependent variables, the findings show that consumer research, a comparatively young discipline, is relatively effective at knowledge development compared to other disciplines. Furthermore, the accumulation of knowledge is significantly increasing, suggesting that our discipline is still in the growing phase of its life cycle and generating continuously improving explanations of consumer-related phenomena. The development of knowledge varies across consumer-relevant dependent variables, with strong explanations for relationships but significantly weaker ones for memory, affect, and attitudes. Moreover, the knowledge synthesized in meta-analyses is fairly—though not fully—representative of the content of primary research on consumers overall. The findings convey a future research agenda by identifying under-researched areas, advising on the selection of dependent variables, providing indicators for the expected contributions of future studies, suggesting implications for career strategies of consumer researchers, and discussing explanations for the observed knowledge growth effects.

We present a novel business case for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) by showing that DEI representations in advertisements have important, and yet unestablished, implications for brands. We show that depicting observably diverse (e.g., in race, gender, or age) models in advertisements creates a perception that the brand offers greater product variety, even when the advertisement neither showcases nor directly suggests greater variety. This effect arises because people believe that observably different customers have more varied needs. Diversity representations, therefore, increase the perception that the brand offers greater product variety, presumably to meet the varied needs of its observably different customers. The findings are important because perceptions of variety improve brand impression, perceptions of a brand’s creativity, willingness to pay, willingness to use, and choice. The findings are particularly relevant for brands that offer limited variety, face resource constraints to diversify, and/or want to benefit from generating perceptions of large product variety while avoiding the drawbacks of managing large assortments.

The promotion of reuse and resale has been receiving extensive attention worldwide for the sake of sustainability. The current research provides insights into this area and identifies a “reuse and resale cycle,” whereby consumers are more willing to resell products they originally obtained second hand, compared to products they obtained brand new. One potential mechanism that accounts for this effect is the relatively weak connection consumers form with the second-hand items they own. Six studies confirmed this effect across various product categories. Study 1 tracked consumers’ actual resale of the possessions they owned in real life. Subsequent studies provided further empirical evidence for the proposed effect, uncovered the underlying mechanism concerning the strength of the connection with the product, and showed that the effect diminished among consumers who chronically have a high tendency to link themselves with their possessions. This research advances the understanding of resale behaviors. It has implications for consumers to avoid retaining excessive possessions and for the second-hand market to develop in a healthy manner, eventually contributing to society’s sustainability in the long run.