This article emphasizes the role of categorization in mental accounting and proposes that once a mental account is established, purchases that are highly congruent with the purpose of the mental ...account (i.e., typical category members) will be more preferred in selection decisions compared to purchases that are less congruent (i.e., atypical category members). This hypothesis is tested in the context of gift cards. Six studies find that people shopping with a retailer-specific gift card—and so, the authors argue, possessing a retailer-specific mental account—express an increased preference for products more typical of the retailer compared to those shopping with more fungible currency. This pattern is found to occur for both well-known retailers, where people already possess product-typicality knowledge, and fictional retailers, where product-typicality cues are provided. An alternative account based on semantic priming is not supported by these data. These results both broaden the contemporary understanding of how mental accounting influences preferences and provide retailers deeper insight into their customers’ decision processes.
The nature and extent of hydrogen bonding in water has been scrutinized for decades, including how it manifests in optical properties. Here we report vacuum ultraviolet absorption spectra for the ...lowest-lying electronic state of subcritical and supercritical water. For subcritical water, the spectrum redshifts considerably with increasing temperature, demonstrating the gradual breakdown of the hydrogen-bond network. Tuning the density at 381 °C gives insight into the extent of hydrogen bonding in supercritical water. The known gas-phase spectrum, including its vibronic structure, is duplicated in the low-density limit. With increasing density, the spectrum blueshifts and the vibronic structure is quenched as the water monomer becomes electronically perturbed. Fits to the supercritical water spectra demonstrate consistency with dimer/trimer fractions calculated from the water virial equation of state and equilibrium constants. Using the known water dimer interaction potential, we estimate the critical distance between molecules (ca. 4.5 Å) needed to explain the vibronic structure quenching.
Framing a contract’s cost as a series of payments over time structures how people mentally account for the contract’s benefits. For example, when people are asked to donate to a charity once a year ...(aggregate pricing), they imagine the benefits they will feel from a single, large donation. In contrast, if the charity frames its request in terms of the equivalent daily donation (periodic pricing), people consider the benefits from making many smaller donations, which is often a more enticing prospect than a single gift. Eight lab experiments and a field test examine how periodic pricing influences purchase intentions. Periodic prices can increase perceived benefits, particularly when people value the first few units of a product each more than additional units of consumption. More frequent payments can help people appreciate recurring pleasures and increase the likelihood of purchasing.
Selfless giving Bartels, Daniel M.; Kvaran, Trevor; Nichols, Shaun
Cognition,
11/2013, Letnik:
129, Številka:
2
Journal Article
Recenzirano
•We find that people who anticipate more personal change over time give more to others.•This influence on generosity is shown to be distinct from several other influences.•This paper tests not only ...the import of connection with the future self but also connection with others.•When more overlap is perceived with others than with the future self, people share more with others.•Three incentive-compatible studies find a relation between personal change and actual charitable giving.
In four studies, we show that people who anticipate more personal change over time give more to others. We measure and manipulate participants’ beliefs in the persistence of the defining psychological features of a person (e.g., his or her beliefs, values, and life goals) and measure generosity, finding support for the hypothesis in three studies using incentive-compatible charitable donation decisions and one involving hypothetical choices about sharing with loved ones.
The lowest band in the charge-transfer-to-solvent ultraviolet absorption spectrum of aqueous chloride ion is studied by experiment and computation. Interestingly, the experiments indicate that at ...concentrations up to at least 0.25 M, where calculations indicate ion pairing to be significant, there is no notable effect of ionic strength on the spectrum. The experimental spectra are fitted to aid comparison with computations. Classical molecular dynamic simulations are carried out on dilute aqueous Cl
−
, Na
+
, and NaCl, producing radial distribution functions in reasonable agreement with experiment and, for NaCl, clear evidence of ion pairing. Clusters are extracted from the simulations for quantum mechanical excited state calculations. Accurate
ab initio
coupled-cluster benchmark calculations on a small number of representative clusters are carried out and used to identify and validate an efficient protocol based on time-dependent density functional theory. The latter is used to carry out quantum mechanical calculations on thousands of clusters. The resulting computed spectrum is in excellent agreement with experiment for the peak position, with little influence from ion pairing, but is in qualitative disagreement on the width, being only about half as wide. It is concluded that simulation by classical molecular dynamics fails to provide an adequate variety of structures to explain the experimental CTTS spectrum of aqueous Cl
−
.
Disagreement with experiment of quantum calculations on the aqueous chloride ion charge-transfer-to-solvent spectrum width is attributed to an inadequate variety of structures provided by the underlying classical molecular mechanical simulations.
•Cognitive theories benefit from engagement with pragmatic settings such as consumer choice.•Individual consumer choices affect the consumers themselves as well as social conditions like the economy ...and environment.•Cognitive models can describe and improve choices with appropriate interventions.•Cognitive science can benefit from large data sets collected in realistic environments that have increasing control.•Roles of context, representation, and learning in decision making can be better identified by examining consumer choice.
We describe what can be gained from connecting cognition and consumer choice by discussing two contexts ripe for interaction between the two fields. The first—context effects on choice—has already been addressed by cognitive science yielding insights about cognitive process but there is promise for more interaction. The second is learning and representation in choice where relevant theories in cognitive science could be informed by consumer choice, and in return, could pose and answer new questions. We conclude by discussing how these two fields of research stand to benefit from more interaction, citing examples of how interfaces of cognitive science with other fields have been illuminating for theories of cognition.
Researchers and practitioners in marketing, economics, and public policy often use preference elicitation tasks to forecast real-world behaviors. These tasks typically ask a series of similarly ...structured questions. The authors posit that every time a respondent answers an additional elicitation question, two things happen: (1) they provide information about some parameter(s) of interest, such as their time preference or the partworth for a product attribute, and (2) the respondent increasingly “adapts” to the task—that is, using task-specific decision processes specialized for this task that may or may not apply to other tasks. Importantly, adaptation comes at the cost of potential mismatch between the task-specific decision process and real-world processes that generate the target behaviors, such that asking more questions can reduce external validity. The authors used mouse and eye tracking to trace decision processes in time preference measurement and conjoint choice tasks. Respondents increasingly relied on task-specific decision processes as more questions were asked, leading to reduced external validity for both related tasks and real-world behaviors. Importantly, the external validity of measured preferences peaked after as few as seven questions in both types of tasks. When measuring preferences, less can be more.
There has been a recent upsurge of research on moral judgment and decision making. One important issue with this body of work concerns the relative advantages of calculating costs and benefits versus ...adherence to moral rules. The general tenor of recent research suggests that adherence to moral rules is associated with systematic biases and that systematic cost-benefit analysis is a normatively superior decision strategy. This article queries both the merits of cost-benefit analyses and the shortcomings of moral rules. We argue that outside the very narrow domain in which consequences can be unambiguously anticipated, it is not at all clear that calculation processes optimize outcomes. In addition, there are good reasons to believe that following moral rules can lead to superior consequences in certain contexts. More generally, different modes of decision making can be seen as adaptations to particular environments.
The use of performance enhancing drugs (PEDs) elicits widespread normative opposition, yet little research has investigated what underlies these judgments. We examine this question comprehensively, ...across 13 studies. We first test the hypothesis that opposition to PED use cannot be fully accounted for by considerations of fairness. We then test the influence of 10 other potential drivers of opposition in an exploratory manner. We find that health risks for the user and rules and laws prohibiting use of anabolic steroids reliably affect normative judgments. Next, we test whether these patterns generalize to a different PED-cognitive-enhancement drugs. Finally, we sketch a framework for understanding these results, borrowing from Social Domain Theory (e.g., Turiel, 1983). We argue that PED use exemplifies a class of violations with properties of moral, conventional, and prudential offenses. This research sheds light on a widespread, but understudied, normative judgment, and illustrates the utility of exploratory methods.
We propose that methods from the study of category-based induction can be used to test the descriptive accuracy of theories of moral judgment. We had participants rate the likelihood that a person ...would engage in a variety of actions, given information about a previous behavior. From these likelihood ratings, we extracted a hierarchical, taxonomic model of how moral violations relate to each other (Study 1). We then tested the descriptive adequacy of this model against an alternative model inspired by Moral Foundations Theory, using classic tasks from induction research (Studies 2a and 2b), and using a measure of confirmation, which accounts for the baseline frequency of these violations (Study 3). Lastly, we conducted focused tests of combinations of violations where the models make differing predictions (Study 4). This research provides new insight into how people represent moral concepts, connecting classic methods from cognitive science with contemporary themes in moral psychology.
PDF
