This article tests low cost interventions to increase influenza vaccination rates. By changing an email announcement sent out to employees in 2014 (n > 30,000), the following interventions are ...tested: incentives, attention to the negative impacts of not get vaccinated, and showing a map to the vaccination centers at the end of the email announcement. Only the map condition helped increase influenza vaccination rates. The use of low-cost interventions can improve influenza vaccination rates though not all interventions work as well as others in the field. In particular, while including maps helped increase vaccination rates, other factors such as negative impact reminders and incentives, which previous studies have found to be successful in the laboratory, did not.
The Limits of Attraction FREDERICK, SHANE; LEE, LEONARD; BASKIN, ERNEST
Journal of marketing research,
08/2014, Volume:
51, Issue:
4
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Consumer research has documented dozens of instances in which the introduction of an "irrelevant" third option affects preferences between the remaining two. In nearly all such cases, the ...unattractive dominated option enhances the attractiveness of the option it most resembles—a phenomenon known as the "attraction effect." In the studies presented here, however, the authors contend that this phenomenon may be restricted to stylized product representations in which every product dimension is represented by a number (e.g., a toaster oven that has a durability rating of 7.2 and ease of cleaning rating of 5.5). Such effects do not typically occur when consumers experience the product (e.g., taste a drink) or when even one of the product attributes is represented perceptually (e.g., differently priced hotel rooms whose quality is depicted with a photo). The authors posit that perceptual representations of attributes do not support the sorts of comparisons that drive the attraction effect with highly stylized examples, and they question the practical significance of the effect.
This article looks at the trade-offs that gift givers and gift receivers make between desirability and feasibility using construal level theory as a framework. Focusing on the asymmetric distance ...from a gift that exists within giver-receiver dyads, the authors propose that, unlike receivers, givers construe gifts abstractly and therefore weight desirability attributes more than feasibility attributes. Support for this proposition emerges in studies examining giver and receiver mind-sets, as well as giver and receiver evaluations of gifts. Furthermore, givers do not choose gifts that maximize receiver happiness or other relationship goals even though givers believe they are doing so. Finally, the authors demonstrate that while givers are sensitive to their distance from the receiver, receivers are not sensitive to this distance.
Purpose
This paper aims to examine whether social comparison in a prior, nonconsumption circumstance (e.g. in an academic setting) affects consumers’ materialism and subsequent spending propensity, ...and explores the incidental feeling of envy as the underlying mechanism.
Design/methodology/approach
Four experiments have been conducted to test these hypotheses. Study 1 manipulated social comparison in an academic domain, and measured undergraduate students’ materialism after they compared themselves to a superior student or to an inferior student. Study 2 used a recall task to manipulate social comparison and examine the mediating role of envy. Study 3 examined which of the two types of envy (benign or malicious) affected materialism. Study 4 examined the downstream consequences on spending propensity in both public and private consumption contexts.
Findings
The results suggest that consumers place greater importance on material goods and are more likely to spend money on publicly visible products after making upward social comparisons than after making downward social comparisons or no comparisons. Furthermore, envy acts as the mediator for the observed effect of incidental social comparison on materialism.
Originality/value
First, this study improves our understanding of the consequences of social comparison and envy by demonstrating that incidental envy (both benign and malicious) experienced in a prior, unrelated social comparison can motivate materialistic pursuits. Second, the present research contributes to the compensatory consumption literature by revealing that, in a social comparison context, envy is the affective underpinning that gives rise to the motivation to engage in compensatory consumer behavior. Third, the findings also enrich materialism research by exploring an important situational antecedent in driving materialistic orientation.
The self-concept maintenance theory holds that many people will cheat in order to maximize self-profit, but only to the extent that they can do so while maintaining a positive self-concept. Mazar, ...Amir, and Ariely (2008, Experiment 1) gave participants an opportunity and incentive to cheat on a problem-solving task. Prior to that task, participants either recalled the Ten Commandments (a moral reminder) or recalled 10 books they had read in high school (a neutral task). Results were consistent with the self-concept maintenance theory. When given the opportunity to cheat, participants given the moral-reminder priming task reported solving 1.45 fewer matrices than did those given a neutral prime (Cohen’s d = 0.48); moral reminders reduced cheating. Mazar et al.’s article is among the most cited in deception research, but their Experiment 1 has not been replicated directly. This Registered Replication Report describes the aggregated result of 25 direct replications (total N = 5,786), all of which followed the same preregistered protocol. In the primary meta-analysis (19 replications, total n = 4,674), participants who were given an opportunity to cheat reported solving 0.11 more matrices if they were given a moral reminder than if they were given a neutral reminder (95% confidence interval = −0.09, 0.31). This small effect was numerically in the opposite direction of the effect observed in the original study (Cohen’s d = −0.04).
•Gift givers prefer to give gift cards to luxury stores.•Gift recipients prefer to receive non-luxury gift cards as gifts.•Resellers demand and buyers pay lower prices for luxury gift ...cards.•Valuation of gift cards is mediated by their perceived utility as gifts.
Gift cards account for a $200 billion market in the US, yet little is known about consumers’ preferences and valuations of different gift cards. We examine how average US consumers feel about exchanging luxury brand gift cards (LGCs) versus non-luxury brand gift cards (NLGCs). Using secondary data analyses, surveys, and experiments, we demonstrate two asymmetries: between valuations of LGCs versus NLGCs and between valuations of gift cards by givers versus recipients. We show that LGCs are valued less than NLGCs with identical price tags. LGCs are more likely to be swapped or sold. Resellers demand and buyers pay lower prices for LGCs. These effects are mediated by the perceived utility of the gift cards as gifts and moderated by a person’s role in the gifting process. Gift givers value and prefer to give LGCs more, whereas recipients prefer and value NLGCs more.
While previous research has shown that consumers strive to keep up their consumption with those who own superior possessions by purchasing conspicuously displayed products (i.e., ...“keeping-up-with-the-Joneses” effect), little attention has been paid to how nonmaterial comparisons might affect their subsequent preferences and spending propensities. This research examines whether and when social comparisons that occur in prior, consumption unrelated domains will influence consumers' conspicuous consumption behaviors. Building upon social comparison theory and the compensatory consumption literature, the authors propose that inferiority experienced in threatening nonmaterial social comparison situations motivates consumers to restore their sense of superiority in the material domain by engaging in conspicuous consumption. However, this depends on whether the comparison target is in a competitive or cooperative relationship with the self and whether consumers have a clear and well-articulated self-concept. Results across four studies confirm these hypotheses. Theoretical contributions and marketing implications are discussed.
•This research examines whether, how and when nonmaterial social comparisons affect conspicuous consumption.•Upward comparisons motivate consumers to restore sense of superiority by making conspicuous consumption.•This effect depends on the relationship between the comparison target and the self, as well as self-concept clarity.
Abstract Relational gifts are given among known social connections and are oriented towards relationship work and care. An abundance of gifting research over the past 50 years has focused on gift ...selection and reception, most recently on variables driving mismatches between what givers and recipients think make good gifts. That work lays an essential foundation. However, important opportunities remain to deepen understandings by broadening the focus to view gifting as a relational, social, and often longitudinal process that is intertwined within evolving social and cultural contexts. This paper conceptualizes three under-researched areas of opportunity on relational gifting: 1) understanding the evolving and contextualized experience of a gift in recipients’ lives, 2) tracing the gift circuit, the dynamics of gifting within social relationships over time, and 3) mapping relational gifting as a dynamic gift system that reflects and reinforces social structure and networks of care. Together, these three areas present important ground for future psychological, sociological, and anthropological consumer research that deepens understanding of when, how, and why relational gifts matter and the relational work that these gifts enable. Ultimately, the goal of this paper is to set an agenda for a new generation of relational gifting research.
Consumers commonly encounter products with descriptors. Descriptors with meanings understood by consumers clearly affect judgments of the described products. However, can descriptors for which ...consumers do not know the word’s semantic meaning (as is increasingly common in a globalized world) still affect judgments in systematic ways, via altering the product’s perceived prototypicality? We examine two kinds of judgments that typically move in the same direction, but which we propose are affected by prototypicality in opposite directions: (a) judgments of how expensive the product is and (b) expectations of the subjective quality of the product. Four experiments show that meaningless descriptors lead consumers to assume that a product is a less prototypical version in its category, increasing price judgments but decreasing quality expectations. Altogether, meaningless descriptors lead to more negative attitudes toward products. This research thus sheds light on the impact of encountering descriptor words with unknown meaning, showing that encountering such words does not lead to the typical effects wherein factors that lift price judgments also lift quality expectations.
Registered Replication Report on Srull and Wyer (1979) McCarthy, Randy J.; Skowronski, John J.; Verschuere, Bruno ...
Advances in methods and practices in psychological science,
09/2018, Volume:
1, Issue:
3
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
Srull and Wyer (1979) demonstrated that exposing participants to more hostility-related stimuli caused them subsequently to interpret ambiguous behaviors as more hostile. In their Experiment 1, ...participants descrambled sets of words to form sentences. In one condition, 80% of the descrambled sentences described hostile behaviors, and in another condition, 20% described hostile behaviors. Following the descrambling task, all participants read a vignette about a man named Donald who behaved in an ambiguously hostile manner and then rated him on a set of personality traits. Next, participants rated the hostility of various ambiguously hostile behaviors (all ratings on scales from 0 to 10). Participants who descrambled mostly hostile sentences rated Donald and the ambiguous behaviors as approximately 3 scale points more hostile than did those who descrambled mostly neutral sentences. This Registered Replication Report describes the results of 26 independent replications (N = 7,373 in the total sample; k = 22 labs and N = 5,610 in the primary analyses) of Srull and Wyer’s Experiment 1, each of which followed a preregistered and vetted protocol. A random-effects meta-analysis showed that the protagonist was seen as 0.08 scale points more hostile when participants were primed with 80% hostile sentences than when they were primed with 20% hostile sentences (95% confidence interval, CI = 0.004, 0.16). The ambiguously hostile behaviors were seen as 0.08 points less hostile when participants were primed with 80% hostile sentences than when they were primed with 20% hostile sentences (95% CI = −0.18, 0.01). Although the confidence interval for one outcome excluded zero and the observed effect was in the predicted direction, these results suggest that the currently used methods do not produce an assimilative priming effect that is practically and routinely detectable.
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