Knowledge that Transforms

Consumers often wonder about the product's maximum output: the highest rotation speed of a blender or the best printing quality of a printer. We examine how the number of levels (e.g., a blender with 3 vs. 7 speeds) influences judgments of maximum product output. Objectively speaking, the number of levels is no more than a set of breakpoints in an already predetermined continuum from the product's minimum to maximum output. Nevertheless, because of the ubiquitous association between number of breakpoints and quantity in daily life, consumers do not simply view more levels as a signal of greater precision (i.e., giving consumers more control over the possible outputs). They also incorrectly believe that the product has greater power (i.e., a higher maximum output), even when such an inference is in conflict with diagnostic attribute information (e.g., watts). A series of five studies documents the phenomenon, its asymmetric nature, and its boundary conditions. Reliance on the inaccurate “more levels, more power” lay theory weakens when participants consider a reduction rather than an increase in number of levels, and it disappears when the consumer is presented with an explicit relationship between each level and its corresponding output value (e.g., level 4:400 W).

Self‐control is a prominent topic in consumer research, where it is often conceptualized as the abstinence from hedonic consumption. We examine whether this conceptualization accurately captures consumers’ experiences of self‐control conflicts/failures in light of seminal self‐control theories in economics and psychology. Rejecting that notion, we argue that self‐control failures are choices in violation of superordinate long‐term goals accompanied by anticipated regret, rather than choices of hedonic over utilitarian consumption. This conceptualization has important methodological, theoretical, and practical implications. Methodologically, it highlights the need for experimental paradigms with higher construct validity. Theoretically, it helps elucidate how self‐control is distinct from impatience and self‐regulation. Practically, it provides a rich set of implications for deducing interventions on the individual and public policy level to help consumers exert self‐control.

This article introduces a Bayesian extension of ANOVA for the analysis of experimental data in consumer psychology. The approach, called BANOVA (Bayesian ANOVA), addresses some common challenges that consumer psychologists encounter in their experimental work, and is specifically suited for the analysis of repeated measures designs. There appears to be a recent surge in interest in those designs based on the recognition that they are sensitive to individual differences in response to experimental treatments and that they offer advantages for assessing causal mediating mechanisms, even at the individual level. BANOVA enables the analysis of repeated measures data derived from mixed within–between‐subjects experiments with Normal and nonNormal‐dependent variables and accommodates unobserved individual differences. It allows for the calculation of effect sizes, planned comparisons, simple effects, spotlight and floodlight analyses, and includes a wide range of mediation, moderation, and moderated mediation analyses. An R software package implements these analyses, and aims to provide a one‐stop shop for the analysis of experiments in consumer psychology. The package is illustrated through applications to a number of data sets from previously published studies.

Products bearing premium brand labels are known to increase perceptions of efficacy and improve objective consumer performance relative to lesser‐branded equivalents, in what is traditionally described as a marketing placebo effect. In this paper, we suggest that experiences bearing these highly regarded brand labels can lead to a reverse effect, such that consumer performance actually declines with their use. Our findings demonstrate across domains of improving mental acuity, learning a new language, and developing financial analysis skills that completing performance‐branded training experiences impairs objective performance in related tasks, relative to lower‐performance‐branded or unbranded counterparts. We posit that branded training experiences can evoke a brand‐as‐master relationship in which consumers take on a subservient role relative to the brand. As a consequence, higher‐performance brands may impose greater demands upon consumers, increasing performance‐anxiety and interfering with an individual's ability to perform effectively. These results document an important ramification of applying branding to learning experiences and identify contexts in which traditionally positive marketing actions can backfire for consumers.

Loss aversion, the principle that losses impact decision making more than equivalent gains, is a fundamental idea in consumer behavior and decision making, though its existence has recently been called into question. Across five unique samples (Ntotal = 17,720), we tested several moderators of loss aversion, which supported a preference construction account. Across studies, more domain knowledge and experience were associated with lower loss aversion, though people of all knowledge and experience levels were loss averse. Among car buyers, those who knew more about a particular car attribute (e.g., fuel economy) were less loss averse for that attribute but not other attributes (e.g., comfort), consistent with the idea that people with less attribute knowledge are more likely to construct preferences, thereby increasing loss aversion. Additionally, older consumers were more loss averse across different loss aversion measures and studies. We discuss implications for several accounts of loss aversion, including accounts rooted in status quo bias, emotion, or ownership. In addition to discovering loss aversion moderators, we cast doubt on recent claims that loss aversion is a fallacy or is fully explained by status quo bias, risk aversion, or the educated laboratory samples often used to study loss aversion.

The authors examine political ideology as it influences how people distribute their donations across multiple charities. Findings from five studies indicate that liberals and conservatives donate similar overall amounts of money; however, liberals tend to give to a greater number of charities, people, and causes overall while giving less to each (breadth). Conservatives tend to donate to fewer charities, people, and causes overall while giving more to each (depth). Using the model of moral motives, conservatives’ endorsement of social order led to their focus on smaller groups and protecting members of these groups as they give with depth. In contrast, liberals’ endorsement of social justice led to their focus on eliminating broad inequality as they give with breadth. However, these ideological tendencies can be reversed as conservatives gave with breadth when protecting social order and liberals gave with depth when equality was restored.

For positive experiences (e.g., when to eat a snack), consumers generally prefer to have them immediately, and for negative experiences (e.g., when to pay a bill), consumers often prefer to delay. Yet, across three studies (plus twelve supplemental studies) we find that anticipatory feelings push in the opposite direction, and do so differently for positive vs. negative events, leading to different time preferences: The desire for immediate positives is stronger than the desire to delay negatives. For negative events, anticipatory utility is strongly negative, reducing the desire to delay bad things (i.e., consumers want to “get it over with” to minimize the psychological discomfort), but for positive events, overall anticipatory utility is weakly positive, and therefore does little to reduce consumers’ desire to expedite good things. This anticipatory asymmetry happens because when consumers think about a future positive event, they both enjoy imagining it (savoring) while simultaneously disliking the feeling of waiting for it (impatience), but when consumers think about a negative event, they both dislike imagining it (dread) and dislike the feeling of waiting for it. We demonstrate the managerial implications of these findings in a pair of field studies using online advertisements for retirement planning.

This article examines the effects of firm motivation (an intrinsic or extrinsic interest in their product) on perceptions of brand authenticity and anticipated product quality. Specifically, studies 1 and 2 show that an intrinsic motivation increases authenticity perceptions which, in turn, increase perceived product quality, even for negatively regarded products. Studies 3a and 3b demonstrate that motivation affects perceived product quality (through perceived authenticity) by influencing deliberate attribute‐level inferences consumers make about the product, and Study 4 demonstrates that the positive effect of intrinsic motivation (through authenticity) disappears in the presence of objective product attribute information, when such inferences are no longer necessary. These findings suggest that authenticity perceptions are malleable, and they shed light on the mechanism through which brand authenticity leads consumers to anticipate that a brand's products will be higher in quality.

We demonstrate that consumers have learned that unhealthy snacks such as potato chips tend to be sold in glossy packages, whereas healthier snacks such as crackers tend to be sold in matte packages (in studies 1–3). As a result, consumers who see a snack food package with a glossy [matte] surface will infer lesser [greater] healthfulness of its contents (study 4), consume less [more] of it (study 5), and be more likely to choose a glossy [matte] package from an assortment of snack packages if motivated to engage in tasty [healthful] eating (study 6). Theoretical and managerial implications as well as future research opportunities are discussed.

We review different streams of social science literature on privacy with the goal of understanding consumer privacy decision making and deriving implications for policy. We focus on psychological and economic factors influencing both consumers' desire and consumers' ability to protect their privacy, either through individual action or through the implementation of regulations applying to firms. Contrary to depictions of online sharing behaviors as careless, we show how consumers fundamentally care about online privacy, and present evidence of numerous actions they take to protect it. However, we also document how prohibitively difficult it is to attain desired, or even desirable, levels of privacy through individual action alone. The remaining instrument for privacy protection is policy intervention. However, again for both psychological and economic reasons, the collective impetus for adequate intervention is often countervailed by powerful interests that oppose it.