Knowledge that Transforms

Joseph W. Newman was born March 31, 1918. At age 17 he started his career as a journalist working for several regional newspapers in Manhattan, KS, while obtaining a B.S. in industrial journalism and an M.S. in economics from Kansas State University. After graduation, he served in the U.S. Navy as a member of the teaching staff of the Naval Training School at Cornell University and then as director of public relations for the Navy Material Redistribution and Disposal Administration. Joe returned to continue his formal education at Harvard. After receiving an M.B.A. degree with distinction in 1947, he worked as a market and media analyst with the Bureau of Advertising in New York for two years before becoming a lecturer at the University of Michigan, teaching marketing and advertising. In 1951 Joe returned to Harvard to work on his doctorate and teach. Starting as a part-time instructor, he was appointed assistant professor in 1954. He received his doctorate in 1957. In 1959, Joe joined the Stanford Business School as an associate professor, where he also served as faculty coordinator for marketing during 1963–64. He was named professor of marketing at the University of Michigan in 1965 and chaired the marketing faculty between 1968 and 1973. From 1973 until his formal retirement in 1988, Joe was professor and head of the Department of Marketing at the University of Arizona. Thereafter, he became professor emeritus at Arizona and taught courses in consumer behavior and marketing management in the M.B.A. program. In 1990, the Association for Consumer Research recognized Joe with its highest honor and named him a Fellow in Consumer Behavior.

How will the widespread diffusion of information technology change consumer research? I argue that information technology will profoundly change the way knowledge is generated and disseminated. In generating knowledge, consumer researchers will see the diminishing use of student subjects, an increase in the use of global samples, panels, secondary data, and information acquisition techniques. In disseminating knowledge, I suggest the possibility of self-organizing journals that would use the ratings of selected readers to determine the status of submitted research. Copyright 2001 by the University of Chicago.

This article examines how confirmatory reasoning moderates the impact of attractive and unattractive common features on consumer preferences. Building on the existing research on confirmatory information processing and the motivated reasoning framework, I propose that consumers evaluate common features in a way that supports their already established preferences. In a series of three studies, I show that the impact of common features is moderated by their attractiveness and the strength of individuals' already established preferences. In the context of a choice task, only attractive features were found to enhance individuals' already established preferences, and this effect was more pronounced for consumers with already established brand preferences compared to consumers who were indifferent to the options. The effect of attractive and unattractive features was reversed in the context of a rejection rather than a selection task. These findings are interpreted in the context of consumers' confirmatory reasoning aimed at reaching a consistent and readily justifiable decision. Copyright 2001 by the University of Chicago.

Born on June 21, 1915, to a rural Midwestern family, John A. Howard grew up on a small farm near Westville, Illinois. Even after spending most of his life in major urban areas, John never lost the slightly countrified tone to his voice or the singular gracefulness of his gentle manner. Elegantly tall, pencil thin, and almost always clad in a neatly pressed suit with a dapper bow tie, he also retained the bedrock values that one might associate with his upbringing in a heartland agricultural community. As a boy, John attended a one-room schoolhouse, played with the other kids down by the railroad tracks, splashed happily in the old swimming hole, and sang in the Methodist church choir, but showed little evidence of any inclination toward the academic side of business. On completing high school (1933), he worked for two years as a life insurance agent (a tough sell during the Great Depression) before attending the small two-year Blackburn College (the first in his family to pursue higher education) and then earning a B.S. in business (1939) and an M.S. in economic history (1941) at the University of Illinois (where he also successfully overcame a severe stuttering problem). After working briefly for the chamber of commerce and serving a stint in the Army's Ordnance Division during World War II (including a dangerous tour of duty at Okinawa), John took advantage of the GI Bill to pursue further graduate studies at Harvard, where he worked with Joseph Schumpeter and ultimately received his Ph.D. in economics (1952). His thesis dealt with British monopoly policy and gave birth to articles appearing in the Journal of Business (1954) and the Journal of Political Economy (1954).

Consumers often browse through many products (a product context) before evaluating a particular target product. We examine the influence of four product context characteristics on happiness with a target product: pleasantness, sequence, domain match with target (i.e., whether products in the context set belong to the same category as the target), and context set size. When context and target match, pleasant and improving (compared to less pleasant and worsening) contexts induce less happiness with the target product. When there is domain mismatch, however, the results are reversed. Furthermore, the assimilation effects are significantly influenced by set size, but the contrast effects are not. While the contrast effects appear to occur by default and appear to be driven by a process of comparison, the assimilation effects appear to be driven by mood. These effects hold even when perception of domain match is manipulated via instructional framing.

Results of a reference analysis led Tellis, Chandy, and Ackerman (1999) to conclude that Journal of Consumer Research (JCR) was not as diverse in its references as Journal of Marketing (JM) and Journal of Marketing Research (JMR). We reexamine the Tellis et al. conclusions with a reference analysis comparison of JCR, JM, and JMR from 1976 to 1995 using an expanded set of reference diversity indicators at the article level of analysis. Our reexamination reveals small or nonsignificant differences among the journals in discipline and journal variety. The results also indicate that JCR articles are more likely to rely on sources that are more conceptually distant from marketing and business than are articles in JM or JMR, regardless of time period. Trends over time reveal that whereas reference diversity among JCR articles has remained relatively stable, reference diversity among JM and JMR articles has increased and decreased, respectively, for two out of three diversity factors. We also extend the findings of Tellis et al. (1999) with a test of the assumption of a positive relationship between reference diversity and subsequent article influence using all 228 articles appearing in JCR from 1991 to 1995. Interestingly, we find that reference diversity has both positive and negative effects on article influence.

When deciding when to make a purchase, people often compare their outcomes to those that would have occurred had they purchased earlier or later. In this article, we examine how pre- and postpurchase comparisons affect regret and satisfaction, and whether consumers learn to avoid decisions that result in regret. In the first two experiments, we show that information learned after the purchase has a greater impact on satisfaction than information learned before the purchase. In addition, negative price comparisons have a greater impact on satisfaction than positive comparisons. These results imply that if consumers who receive postpurchase information wish to avoid future feelings of regret, they should defer their purchases longer. Our second two experiments demonstrate this phenomenon: Subjects who were exposed to postchoice information set higher decision thresholds, consistent with the minimization of future regret. Paradoxically, providing subjects with additional postchoice information resulted in decreased average earnings, suggesting that consumers may try to avoid future regret even when doing so conflicts with expected value maximization.

Multidisciplinary evidence suggests that people often make evaluative judgments by monitoring their feelings toward the target. This article examines, in the context of moderately complex and consciously accessible stimuli, the judgmental properties of consciously monitored feelings. Results from four studies show that, compared to cold, reason-based assessments of the target, the conscious monitoring of feelings provides judgmental responses that are (a) potentially faster, (b) more stable and consistent across individuals, and importantly (c) more predictive of the number and valence of people's thoughts. These findings help explain why the monitoring of feelings is an often diagnostic pathway to evaluation in judgment and decision making.

We compare the cognitive processing of words written in alphabetic scripts with the cognitive processing of words written in logographic scripts. We suggest that the processing of words written in alphabetic scripts relies more heavily on the storage of—and the serial rehearsal properties of—short-term memory's phonological loop. In contrast, the processing of words written in logographic scripts relies more on the storage of—and the spatial-relational rehearsal properties of—visual short-term memory. A series of three experiments investigates implications of these processing differences within a single language, Korean, where words can be written in the alphabetic Hangul or in the logographic Hancha. These experiments examine contextual interference from auditory and visual stimuli, relational memory between brand names and auditory and visual brand identifiers, and two qualitative processing outcomes, serial-order memory and spatial-relational memory.

This research investigates the conditions under which persistent preferences for product attributes occur and the processes that lead to these effects. Our theoretical framework suggests that ambiguity in the context in which the initial choices are made determines the level of certainty in the initial preference. Certainty in the initial preference combines with uninformative additional experience to create a shift in the relevance of the attributes and biased information gathering in subsequent choices. These tendencies in turn lead to persistent preferences for the attributes of a previously chosen brand. In experiments 1A, 1B, and 1C, we varied the levels of ambiguity in the initial choice context and additional experience with a chosen brand and studied their effect on preference persistence. The findings offer support to the processes we propose. In experiment 2, we found that additional experience caused persistent preferences even for an irrelevant attribute as long as it was a differentiating attribute in the initial choice. Experiments 3 and 4 found that (a) the relative attractiveness of the chosen brand in the initial choice context and (b) a deliberation that compared the competing attributes in terms of their ability to render certain benefits attenuated the effects found in experiments 1A and 1B.