Knowledge that Transforms

Social movements, such as Black Lives Matter, surge when support grows for their social justice goals. At their core, social movements advance when people act collectively by rising in solidarity with a shared purpose to address injustice and inequality. Drawing on insights from consumer psychology, this review investigates how social movements succeed in creating social change. We build on an established 21st‐century framework for how social movements succeed to outline the promising practices of successful social movements. For each of these practices, we identify the consumer psychology mechanisms that motivate collective action and encourage people to transform from bystanders to upstanders, those who provide the grassroots momentum for successful social movements. We illustrate this framework with examples from the growth of the Black Lives Matter movement. Finally, we highlight insights from consumer psychology that promote an understanding of social movements, and we raise research questions to encourage more consumer psychologists to investigate how social movements succeed.

In this article, we (1) discuss the reasons why pre‐registration is a good idea, both for the field and individual researchers, (2) respond to arguments against pre‐registration, (3) describe how to best write and review a pre‐registration, and (4) comment on pre‐registration’s rapidly accelerating popularity. Along the way, we describe the (big) problem that pre‐registration can solve (i.e., false positives caused by p‐hacking), while also offering viable solutions to the problems that pre‐registration cannot solve (e.g., hidden confounds or fraud). Pre‐registration does not guarantee that every published finding will be true, but without it you can safely bet that many more will be false. It is time for our field to embrace pre‐registration, while taking steps to ensure that it is done right.

When listing a possession for rent on a consumer‐to‐consumer platform, owners typically write a brief product description. Such descriptions often include attachment cues—indications that the owner is emotionally attached to the product. How does knowing that an owner is sharing a possession that has sentimental value impact rental likelihood? Evidence from secondary data and four experiments suggests that although some owners mistakenly expect attachment cues to enhance a product's appeal, attachment cues instead tend to deter prospective renters. We attribute this effect to renters' desire to avoid the responsibility of protecting (e.g., from damage, loss, or theft) an item to which the owner is emotionally attached. Whereas prior research has examined how product attachment influences owners' decisions, we show how an owners' expression of attachment affects others involved in a transaction. By refuting the lay theories of some owners about how to attract renters, our findings provide practical implications for owners and the platforms that connect them to users in the multi‐billion‐dollar consumer‐to‐consumer rental market.

To address the growing health awareness of consumers, the food industry designs novel food alternatives, which are similar but not identical to existing foods (e.g., meat‐reduced or plant‐based burgers). The idea is that consumers can continue to eat their preferred kind of food and still follow a healthy diet. However, we argue that it is too short‐sighted to hope that positive similarities to existing products help to increase purchase intentions, because consumers often focus on distinct attributes of new products and neglect the positive attributes shared by existing and novel food alternatives. We tested our hypotheses in six studies in which participants provided or received attributes for classic food products and novel alternatives with substituted ingredients to make them healthier. We observed that consumers perceive the distinguishing attributes between a classic product and its novel, healthier alternative to be predominantly negative, whereas they perceive most shared attributes to be positive. Moreover, we found the predicted neglect of shared attributes in the formation of taste expectations and purchase intentions. In the conclusion, we put forward that the observed evaluation bias can impede the success of novel food alternatives and discuss possible ways to overcome this disadvantage.

Millions of U.S. adults join online support groups to attain health goals, but the social ties they form are often too weak to provide the support they need. What impedes the strengthening of ties in such groups? We explore the role of demographic differences in causing the impediment and demographic self‐disclosure in removing it. Using a field study of online quit‐smoking groups complemented by three laboratory experiments, we find that members tend to hide demographic differences, concerned about poor social integration that will weaken their ties. However, the self‐disclosures of demographic differences that naturally occur during group member discussions actually strengthen their ties, which in turn facilitates attainment of members’ health goals. In other words, social ties in online groups are weak not because members are demographically different, but because they are reluctant to self‐disclose their differences. If they do self‐disclose, this breeds interpersonal connection, trumping any demographic differences among them. Data from both laboratory and field about two types of demographic difference—dyad‐level dissimilarity and group‐level minority status—provide convergent support for our findings.

Surprisingly, little research has examined how consumer responses to specific flavor characteristics of food are formed or how they may fluctuate situationally. We address this lacuna in the literature on the hedonic appreciation of food by demonstrating that enjoyment along one important gustatory dimension, flavor complexity, varies with the degree to which consumers are mentally depleted. Specifically, showing that gustatory sensations are more cognitively demanding than previously thought, findings from three studies evince that cognitive depletion reduces consumer enjoyment of complex‐flavored (but not simple‐flavored) foods via a reduction in pleasure that otherwise can be derived from complex flavors. We establish this effect across three different food categories and provide preliminary evidence for consumers’ ability to identify flavors as the underlying process. Our findings offer theoretical contributions and avenues for future research.

AbstractAdvances in robotics, automation, and artificial intelligence increasingly enable firms to replace human labor with technology, thereby fundamentally transforming how goods and services are produced. From both managerial and societal points of view, it is therefore important to understand demand‐side incentives for firms to employ human labor. We begin to address this question by examining for which products and services consumers are more likely to favor human (vs. robotic) labor. In six studies, we demonstrate that consumers prefer human (vs. robotic) labor more for products with higher (vs. lower) symbolic value (e.g., when expressing something about one's beliefs and personality is of greater importance). We theorize that this is because consumers have stronger uniqueness motives in more (vs. less) symbolic consumption contexts (and associate human labor more strongly with product uniqueness). In line with this account, we demonstrate that individual differences in need for uniqueness moderate the interaction between production mode and symbolic motives and that a measure of uniqueness motives mediates the effect of consumption context on preferences for human (vs. robotic) production.