Knowledge that Transforms

This article explores Thompson and Haytko's (1997) interpretation of fashion discourses by bringing together two opposing perspectives on consumers' use of objects as signs. The first perspective assumes that the consumer has free reign in the play of signs (i.e., the consumer is constituting). The second assumes that the consumer is imprisoned by the signs and codes of the historical moment (i.e., the consumer is constituted). The dialectical and discursive tension between these two perspectives is used as an orienting framework in the hermeneutic analyses of 14 phenomenological interviews. Thompson and Haytko's (1997) findings/claims remain pertinent in a professional, middle-class context. In addition, this research contributes to their lived hegemony premise by emphasizing the dominating tendencies of marketing systems.

Calling consumers' attention to their cultural identity can make them aware of their membership in a group and, therefore, can induce a group mind-set. This mind-set, in turn, leads them to make decisions that minimize the risk of negative outcomes to both themselves and others. The effects of this mind-set generalize over both group and individual choice situations. These possibilities were confirmed in a series of six experiments. Results showed that making people feel part of an ad hoc group increased not only their use of equality as a basis for allocating resources to themselves and others, but also their tendency to compromise in individual consumer choice situations. Moreover, calling Asian and Western participants' attention to their cultural identity also induced feelings of being part of a group and, as a result, had analogous effects on decisions in both group and consumer choice situations.

Ninth graders were randomly exposed to one of eight slice-of-life videotapes showing stimulus advertising (cigarette, antismoking, both, neither) and unfamiliar peers who either did or did not smoke cigarettes. The findings indicate that the cigarette advertising primed positive smoker stereotypes, which caused subjects to seek out favorable information about the peers shown smoking. Subjects' beliefs and intentions about cigarette consumption were thereby enhanced by the joint effects of advertising and peers. However, an antismoking advertisement shown in conjunction with cigarette advertising made salient negative smoker stereotypes, evoked unfavorable thoughts about peers shown smoking, and prevented cigarette advertising from promoting smoking.

This article examines systematic differences in people's spending behavior when using foreign currencies. Rather than overspend or underspend in general, we show that individuals' valuation of a product in an unfamiliar foreign currency is biased toward its nominal value—its face value—with inadequate adjustment for the exchange rate. This leads to underspending when the face value of a foreign currency is a multiple of an equivalent unit of a home currency (e.g., 4 Malaysian ringgits = 1 U.S. dollar) and overspending when it is a fraction (e.g., .4 Bahraini dinar = 1 U.S. dollar). Four studies demonstrate the robustness of the face value effect across different currencies, exchange rate frames, and with samples from two countries, and two studies show that ability-related factors such as time pressure and experience moderate the face value effect. The article concludes by discussing the theoretical implications of the findings.

When consumers try to assess the performance of a product on a key benefit, their information search often reveals both diagnostic information and irrelevant information. Although one would expect irrelevant information to have little impact on predictions of product performance, we present evidence that the irrelevant information systematically weakens consumers' beliefs that the product will provide the benefit. We show that this dilution effect persists after subjects have acknowledged the irrelevance of the additional information but that it does depend on whether the product information is processed with the desired benefit in mind. We conclude that consumers are selectively looking for information that suggests the product will deliver the desired benefit and that they categorize any additional evidence, be it irrelevant or disconfirming, as not confirming. As a consequence, irrelevant information weakens consumers' beliefs in the product's ability to deliver the benefit.

Journal Article Marketplace Metacognition and Social Intelligence Get access Peter Wright Peter Wright Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic PubMed Google Scholar Journal of Consumer Research, Volume 28, Issue 4, March 2002, Pages 677–682, https://doi.org/10.1086/338210 Published: 01 March 2002

This article examines the effects of evaluative inconsistencies in product attribute information on the strength of the resultant attitude, as manifested in its predictive ability. The existing literature makes opposing predictions regarding the effects of information inconsistency on attitude strength. We seek to resolve this dilemma by investigating the likelihood of inconsistency reconciliation—that is, whether or not people elaborate on inconsistencies with the goal of achieving an integrated evaluation. A strengthening effect should result when the processing goal is conducive to reconciliation and goal-facilitating factors are present in the environment; however, a weakening effect should be obtained when conditions are unfavorable to inconsistency reconciliation. Results from three experiments provide support for this conceptualization and offer a possible resolution of the opposing theoretical perspectives present in the literature.

Personality research has long been a fringe player in the study of consumer behavior. Little research is directly devoted to personality issues, and if consumer personality is investigated at all, it tends to be from the narrow perspective of developing yet another individual difference measure in an already crowded field of personality scales or considering the moderating effects of a given trait on some relationship of interest. Understanding the individual person in his or her role as a consumer should be a key issue in the study of consumer behavior, but in order to realize this vision the scope of personality research has to be broadened. In this essay I discuss recent work in personality psychology that may serve as the foundation for the development of a personology of the consumer, in which people are seen as dispositional, goal-striving, and narrative entities engaged in consumption in the broadest sense.

This article presents an ethnographic investigation into choice for postsecondary education. Findings from the investigation highlight choice experience during which the consumer finds the object of choice to be a perfect fit or to fit like a glove. The article seeks to expand consumer research's repertoire of choice models to grasp more effectively such choices. Practice theory, which emphasizes the sociohistorical and embodied qualities of everyday experience, is used to develop the Fits-Like-a-Glove (FLAG) framework of choice. Overall, the data suggest that FLAG choice entails an embodied, holistic experience of perfect fit arising during a consumer's in situ encounter with an object of choice. FLAG choice is explained by highlighting the sociohistorical shaping of this encounter. By comparing and contrasting it with dominant models of choice in consumer research, the implications of the FLAG framework of choice are brought into relief.

Our research examines the role of prior knowledge in learning new product information. Three studies demonstrate that, compared to consumers with lower prior knowledge, those with higher prior knowledge learn less about a new product. Further, higher knowledge consumers are able to learn more but learn less due to motivational deficits; inferior learning of new product information by those with higher prior knowledge is caused by inattention at encoding rather than reconstructive errors at retrieval. These results hold both when prior knowledge is manipulated experimentally (studies 1 and 2) and when it is an individual difference factor (study 3).