Knowledge that Transforms

How do consumers combine multiple risk items when forming overall risk judgments? Drawing on the fuzzy trace theory and categorical averaging, this research finds that adding a low-risk item to a high-risk item reduces the overall risk perception because people reason categorically about risk. They impose categorical distinctions on quantitative risk information, and when combining categorical information, they tend to average across categories instead of adding. Eight studies in the context of medical and health product decisions (N = 5,152) provide convergent evidence showing that when items in different risk tiers are considered together, they are consistently evaluated in a subtractive manner, leading to a higher likelihood of taking the objectively riskier medication (studies 1A, 1B, 1C, and 2). This effect is eliminated when the probability of one side effect is exceedingly high (study 3) or when the task requires reliance on verbatim representation of probabilities (study 4). The effect also disappears when risk information is presented graphically in a way that emphasizes the additive property of multiple risks (studies 5A and 5B). The findings have important implications for the fields of risk perception, risk communication, and consumer health and medical decision-making.

Consumers often receive and evaluate temporal information, such as the number of days it will take a package to arrive or the number of days a vacation will last. Across eight preregistered studies (N = 4,758), we examine how using days-of-the-week information in descriptions of temporal intervals (e.g., “ordered on Monday, February 1, delivered on Saturday, February 6” vs. “ordered on February 1, delivered on February 6”) affects consumers’ duration perceptions. We propose that the days-of-the-week framing prompts people to rely on narrow-span implicit scales characterized by lower thresholds for magnitude categories. These implicit scales lead people to judge objectively equivalent temporal intervals to be longer, which in turn has downstream consequences for consumers’ time-versus-money tradeoffs, work planning, and provider-switching decisions. This research adds to our understanding of how decision context can activate different implicit scales and how these scales shape consumer judgments.

This study examines the impact of shared decision-making on investor overconfidence. Data from 2,000 investors, 6,394 consumers, and 657 experimental participants shed light on whether consumers who engage in joint financial decision-making are less affected by investor overconfidence than those who decide on their own. The findings show that investors who jointly decide are substantially less overconfident. However, family- or friend-inclined interactions are more effective in reducing overconfidence than relying on a financial advisor. The current research theoretically argues and empirically shows that shared metaknowledge drives this diminishing effect by highlighting unknown aspects of a financial decision. Compared to providing investors with solutions, problem reformulation, validation, or legitimation, only metaknowledge consistently decreases overconfidence in joint financial decision-making. It is argued that the process of highlighting unknowns can explain why interactions with family and friends have a more pronounced impact on investor overconfidence than consulting a professional advisor. The study provides a feasible debiasing tool to consumers, financial institutions, and other financial service providers to decrease overconfidence by emphasizing unknown aspects of an investment toward improving the quality of a consumer’s financial decisions under uncertainty.

In an effort to find a novel way to enhance the attractiveness of healthy food, this article proposes surface mimicry—that is, designing a product to visually resemble another product—as an effective intervention to communicate property information to consumers. Specifically, it advances the notion that exposure to surface mimicry primes property mapping, a thinking style that leads consumers to transfer property information from one product onto another. To this end, three studies show that exposure to a target food product (e.g., kiwifruit) mimicking visual characteristics of another, modifier food product (e.g., popsicle) induces a transfer of attribute values of the modifier onto the target product for salient, alignable attributes on which the products differ (e.g., tastiness). A fourth study points to the activation of a property-mapping mindset as the underlying process. Finally, the effect is shown to persist, but it attenuates when the difference in belief(s) about the target and mimicked product is substantial (e.g., the taste expectations for Brussels sprouts and popsicles).

How do brands change in environments defined by increasing consumer heterogeneity? Drawing on assemblage theory, this research develops the concepts of brand morphogenesis and consumer sub-assemblage to explain how heterogeneous consumer groups instigate, reinforce and hinder the evolution of a brand. This longitudinal case study of a Swedish fashion brand delineates the role of heterogeneous consumer sub-assemblages in the continual process of emergence and transformation of a brand assemblage through space and time—a process defined as brand morphogenesis. The findings detail brand morphogenesis in the sub-assemblage dynamics of exploration, actualization, and habituation of value, as heterogeneous consumer groups form consumer sub-assemblages in interaction with other brand components and interact in patterns of coexisting with, coopting, and contesting other sub-assemblages. By charting consumers’ value negotiations as they play out within and among consumer sub-assemblages, this research contributes to understanding continuity and change for brands that face increasing consumer heterogeneity.

Every day, consumers make decisions that have both direct and indirect impact on their health. The COVID-19 pandemic, and the long-term physical and mental complications that have ensued, underscores the importance of developing a holistic understanding of drivers of consumers’ health and medical decisions. Without this comprehensive approach, health appeals or interventions are destined to fall short of achieving positive and long-lasting outcomes. Beyond the pandemic, medical and biotechnological advancements can have greater impact on global lifespan when the behavioral sciences offer a critical, complementary lens to enhance the understanding, adoption, and implementation of these new technologies. By illuminating how consumers think, feel, choose, and behave in this multi-faceted decision environment, consumer researchers are well equipped to contribute to the ongoing quest to improve population health. In this curation, we review many articles published in the Journal of Consumer Research (JCR) that focus on a spectrum of health and medical decisions, while highlighting five (Bolton et al. 2008; Botti, Orfali, and Iyengar 2009; Briley, Rudd, and Aaker 2017; Longoni, Bonezzi, and Morewedge 2019; Moorman and Matulich 1993). We define consumer health and medical decisions broadly, as those relating to the prevention (e.g., minimizing stress, moderating alcohol consumption), diagnosis (e.g., utilizing health professionals for checkups), remedy and improvement (e.g., taking medication to cure an infection), and maintenance (e.g., monitoring dietary intake) of consumer health (Moorman and Matulich 1993). We build on these articles to propose a new 5S (Self, Social, Solution, Service provider, Societal/Situational) framework to explain holistic drivers underlying consumers’ health and medical decisions (figure 1). We hope that researchers will find this conceptual framework useful in structuring the existing consumer research literature on health. Furthermore, the 5S framework provides a clear set of four key directions that future researchers will find worthwhile in undertaking research on health and medical decision-making—either by delving deeper into the 5Ss or by going bigger and broader beyond the scope of past research.