As smart products gain autonomy, they increasingly perform tasks that consumers used to carry out themselves. This challenges foundational assumptions in consumer psychology that link psychological value to consumers’ active participation in product use. This article introduces the concept of operative displacement, a consumption arrangement in which smart products perform the core tasks of product use while consumers move from operative agency (directly executing tasks) to meta-agency (configuring, supervising, evaluating, and selectively intervening). We outline three dimensions of operative displacement: process-outcome decoupling, effort conversion into supervisory load, and attentional recession and relational intensification, along with their psychological consequences and implications for future research.
Modern technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI) can contribute to economic and societal prosperity. Yet, independent of their actual effects, consumers, workers, and the public often hold negative beliefs about these technologies, which can contribute to aversion to AI and technological change more broadly. This article examines technology lay beliefs, with AI as the focal case, and proposes an interconnected two-layer model to explain their societal impact. Layer 1 captures general psychological predispositions to technological change that provide a baseline for why technology lay beliefs often emphasize potential losses. Layer 2 captures specific contextual interpretations of AI that amplify or attenuate this baseline. We use this model to organize existing research and discuss the societal and political consequences of technology lay beliefs in the age of AI.
Game theory provides a language and a set of tools for analyzing behavior in a wide range of strategic interactions, including negotiation. Here, we illustrate behavioral game theory's contributions to the study of negotiation, with a particular focus on the role that communication and emotion play in negotiation. We explain how researchers can use games to study various negotiation phenomena, including the effects of power, information asymmetry, and identity on negotiation processes and outcomes. The concepts, methods, and findings we review offer insights and tools that negotiation scholars and practitioners can harness to advance their understanding of negotiation.
The conflict expression framework was developed to generate new practical and theoretical insights into how conflict communication affects group processes and negotiated outcomes. The framework proposes that conflict expressions vary along two dimensions: directness and oppositional intensity. The framework suggested that the effects of different types of conflict on group processes and outcomes likely depend on how the conflict is expressed, that conflict within groups is likely perceived differently by different members of the same social unit, and that conflict affects negotiation processes dynamically through reciprocated statements and responses. We review research building on the framework – including empirical tests of the main propositions, methodological advances, and as a theoretical foundation for conflict communication research more broadly – and identify directions for the future.
