Knowledge that Transforms

This work presents convergent evidence that experiential purchases are more conducive to interpersonal conversations than are material purchases—that is, experiences have higher conversational value, which helps explain why they afford consumers greater happiness than do objects (Van Boven and Gilovich 2003). Further, two experiments demonstrate that factors known to differ between experiential and material purchases—closeness to the self, social approval, and purchase uniqueness—help explain why experiences are preferred as a topic of conversation over objects, and suggest a social motivation for talking more about experiences. Indeed, when the motivation to build a relationship with the conversation partner is removed, the preference to share about experiences (vs. objects) disappears. Together, these findings add to and help integrate the growing literature on the relation between purchase type (material vs. experiential) and purchase-related happiness.

Five studies provide converging evidence for the joint effect of perceived economic mobility and socioeconomic status (SES) on compensatory behavior, such that low SES consumers who perceive low economic mobility (i.e., economically stuck consumers) seek more variety than other consumers. We trace this effect to these consumers’ desire to compensate for their low sense of personal control. Furthermore, we show that these consumers’ variety-seeking tendency disappears when their sense of control is boosted by other means or when the more varied option is not associated with a sense of control. Alternative explanations based on instrumental benefits, reactance, and affect were tested and did not account for the effect. Thus, the current research provides fresh insights to consumer research by contributing to the literature on compensatory behavior, variety seeking, and SES.

Routines are the taken-for-granted practices that form the rhythm of everyday life, making people feel secure. How do consumers manage when their routines are disrupted? Practice theorists assert that practices are important to understanding consumption and stress their shared, repetitive, and conventional nature. When practices are stable, they are performed effortlessly, producing feelings of ease and trust in a predictable world. People are often unaware of the embodied competencies, or practical understandings, involved in the performance of these practices. However, practical understandings become apparent when elements of practices are misaligned. Our findings advance Giddens’s (1984) theorization of ontological security by showing how the interplay between practical and discursive understandings and material configurations works to produce different ontological states that we call embedded security, embedded insecurity, discursive insecurity, acclimating security, and new embedded security. We also show how households subtly rework the underlying constitutive rules that anchor important practices in place within practice alignment.

When confronted with racial stigma, how do people manage it? What specific arrangements of objects and tactics do they mobilize to make everyday life more tolerable (if not more equal)? The politics of respectability (respectability) is one such arrangement. Respectability makes life more tolerable by offering a counternarrative that disavows stigma through status-oriented displays. This strategy of action emerged alongside mass consumer culture in the late 19th century, but what relevance does it have to those who are stigmatized in contemporary consumer culture? Based on ethnographic interviews and observations with middle-class African Americans, respectability remains an important strategy that has undergone profound changes since its origins while still operating in similar ways. In the late 20th century it fractured into two related but distinct counternarratives: (1) “discern and avoid,” which seeks distance from whatever is stigmatized, and (2) “destigmatize,” using black culture as a source of high status. Perceptions of how well either counternarrative manages stigma depend on how ideology, strategy, and consumption are connected via specific sociohistorical features of place and individual power resources. I illustrate those connections through four cases that show perceived success and perceived failure for each counternarrative.

Interviews have been a key primary data source for research published in the Journal of Consumer Research. This tutorial aims to walk readers through the design and execution of interview-based empirical research on consumers and consumption.

Feeling left out has been shown to trigger primal, automatic responses in an attempt to compensate for threats to social belongingness. Such responses typically involve reconnection with other human beings. However, four experiments provide evidence that exposure to or interaction with anthropomorphic consumer products (i.e., products featuring characteristics of being alive through design, interaction, intelligence, responsiveness, and/or personality) can also satisfy (at least partially) social needs, ultimately mitigating previously documented effects of social exclusion. Specifically, interacting with anthropomorphic (vs. nonanthropomorphic) products following social exclusion reduces (1) the need to exaggerate the number of one’s current social connections, (2) the anticipated need to engage with close others in the future, and (3) the willingness to engage in prosocial behavior. These effects are driven by a need for social assurance, rather than positive affect. Moreover, an important boundary condition exists: drawing attention to the fact that an anthropomorphic product is not actually alive (i.e., the product does not provide genuine human interaction) limits its ability to fulfill social needs. Thus, in a time when consumer products are becoming increasingly anthropomorphic in design and function, the results reveal potentially important consequences for human-to-human relationships.

Deciphering consumers’ sentiment expressions from big data (e.g., online reviews) has become a managerial priority to monitor product and service evaluations. However, sentiment analysis, the process of automatically distilling sentiment from text, provides little insight regarding the language granularities beyond the use of positive and negative words. Drawing on speech act theory, this study provides a fine-grained analysis of the implicit and explicit language used by consumers to express sentiment in text. An empirical text-mining study using more than 45,000 consumer reviews demonstrates the differential impacts of activation levels (e.g., tentative language), implicit sentiment expressions (e.g., commissive language), and discourse patterns (e.g., incoherence) on overall consumer sentiment (i.e., star ratings). In two follow-up studies, we demonstrate that these speech act features also influence the readers’ behavior and are generalizable to other social media contexts, such as Twitter and Facebook. We contribute to research on consumer sentiment analysis by offering a more nuanced understanding of consumer sentiments and their implications.

Statistical mediation analysis has become the technique of choice in consumer research to make causal inferences about the influence of a treatment on an outcome via one or more mediators. This tutorial aims to strengthen two weak links that impede statistical mediation analysis from reaching its full potential. The first weak link is the path from mediator to outcome, which is a correlation. Six conditions are described that this correlation needs to meet in order to make plausible causal inferences: directionality, reliability, unconfoundedness, distinctiveness, power, and mediation. Recommendations are made to increase the plausibility of causal inferences based on statistical mediation analysis. Sweetspot analysis is proposed to establish whether an observed mediator-outcome correlation falls within the region of statistically meaningful correlations. The second weak link is the communication of mediation results. Four components of informative communication of mediation analysis are described: effect decomposition, effect size, difference testing, and data sharing. Recommendations are made to improve the communication of mediation analysis. A review of 166 recently published mediation analyses in the Journal of Consumer Research, a reanalysis of two published datasets, and Monte Carlo simulations support the conclusions and recommendations.

This tutorial provides evidence that character misrepresentation in survey screeners by Amazon Mechanical Turk Workers (“Turkers”) can substantially and significantly distort research findings. Using five studies, we demonstrate that a large proportion of respondents in paid MTurk studies claim a false identity, ownership, or activity in order to qualify for a study. The extent of misrepresentation can be unacceptably high, and the responses to subsequent questions can have little correspondence to responses from appropriately identified participants. We recommend a number of remedies to deal with the problem, largely involving strategies to take away the economic motive to misrepresent and to make it difficult for Turkers to recognize that a particular response will gain them access to a study. The major short-run solution involves a two-survey process that first asks respondents to identify their characteristics when there is no motive to deceive, and then limits the second survey to those who have passed this screen. The long-run recommendation involves building an ongoing MTurk participant pool (“panel”) that (1) continuously collects information that could be used to classify respondents, and (2) eliminates from the panel those who misrepresent themselves.

In this article, we consider why employing realistic experimental designs and measuring actual behavior is important and beneficial for consumer research. More specifically, we discuss when, where, and how researchers might go about doing this in order to increase the veracity and believability of their work. We analyze the choice of independent variables (IVs) along the experimental-realism dimension, ranging from artificial to realistic, and the choice of dependent variables (DVs) along the behavioral-measures dimension ranging from hypothetical intention to actual behavior. Importantly, we also map various goals of consumer research along these two dimensions to highlight when it is most appropriate to enhance the realism and behavioral measures of an experiment. Using a number of illustrative examples from research in the extant literature, we specifically highlight how consumer researchers can increase experimental realism and utilize actual-behavior measures in their experiments in order to improve both the fidelity of the research and the likelihood that the research provides insight into real consumer behavior.