We study the impact of shelf-life information on consumers' expectations about food healthiness, naturalness, and environmental friendliness, as well as purchase decisions. Through seven studies (and four additional studies reported in the appendix), we demonstrate that shelf-life information produces divergent effects: foods with a longer shelf life are perceived as less wasteful and more environmentally friendly but also as less natural and less healthy. Accordingly, we demonstrate that emphasizing naturalness or healthiness (vs. waste reduction or environmental friendliness) increases consumers' preference for foods with a shorter (vs. longer) shelf life. This happens even when foods with different shelf lives have nearly identical ingredients and nutritional quality, or when the longer shelf life can objectively be attributed to better packaging rather than the food itself, unless consumers are explicitly prompted to elaborate on why the foods differ in shelf life. Theoretically, these findings contribute to the literature on shelf life as a determinant of food choice and deepen understanding of perceptions of naturalness and environmental friendliness. Practically, our research provides insights on how consumers' preference for naturalness can ultimately lead to more waste by increasing the appeal of foods with shorter shelf lives.
Abstract Researchers are increasingly challenged by this question: On what basis can they claim their work contributes to research progress? We propose that contemporary consumer research relies on three broad strategies for warranting such claims. An establishing‐an‐effect strategy claims progress based on confidence that a focal relationship between variables X and Y reliably replicates. A theory‐of‐the‐effect strategy claims progress based on confidence that a local mechanistic account specifies when and how a particular effect occurs. A theoretical framework strategy instead claims progress based on confidence in an explanation that transcends any single effect paradigm. We (a) clarify how these strategies differ in their core logic, methodological emphases, and vulnerabilities; (b) document via a coding of recent articles in leading consumer research journals that the field relies overwhelmingly on the theory‐of‐the‐effect strategy and rarely advances theoretical frameworks; and (c) develop actionable guidance for progressing from theories of effects to frameworks. We argue that recognizing the merits and vulnerabilities of each strategy—and deliberately leveraging the strategies in combination—provides a stronger basis for claiming research progress.
Abstract Authenticity is highly valued in the marketplace, yet consumers often disagree on what is authentic and even attribute authenticity to “fake” marketplace entities. Although prior research has advanced understanding by identifying multiple types and components of authenticity, it remains loosely connected to broader psychological theory, limiting integration and predictive power. We propose a conceptual framework that shifts the focus from what authenticity is to how authenticity judgments are formed. Integrating a systematic review of authenticity research with dual‐process theories, we position authenticity as the outcome of a judgment process that proceeds through two routes: a fact‐based route grounded in deliberate, analytical evaluation of claims and a feeling‐based route based on intuitive processing, emotional resonance, and automatic associations. This distinction explains paradoxes in authenticity research and generates novel predictions regarding (1) the authenticity cues consumers prioritize under each route and resulting authenticity judgments, (2) the situational and motivational conditions that activate each route, and (3) downstream implications for brands. By embedding authenticity judgments within established psychological theory, we offer a more unified and predictive foundation for authenticity research.
Abstract As the use of interactive artificial intelligence (AI) expands exponentially, it will permeate into many aspects of consumers' lives, including decision‐making and consumption. As marketers, it is important to understand how consumers currently use interactive AI and how this usage will evolve. We propose that the increased functionality of interactive AI will encourage consumers to view many interactive AI products as long‐term partners, instead of as static tools for finite tasks. Consequently, the future uses of interactive AI will be determined not only by the advancement of the underlying technology but also by consumer responses to repeated interactions with AI technology. We propose a taxonomy of human–AI partnerships (i.e., AI Assistants, AI Agents, AI Companions), provide a profile for each type of AI partner, anticipate how AI partnerships will evolve over time, and discuss how this evolution will influence AI usage. Finally, we provide an extensive agenda for future research.
Abstract The rapid growth of generative AI has generated excitement about its potential and concern about its effects on psychological research. Schmitt, Hao, Pham, and Hofstetter (2026) offer Generative Grounded Theory (GGT) as a seven‐step framework for incorporating generative artificial intelligence into inductive theory building. It uses AI to support corpus formation, data structuring, coding, conceptual clustering, abstraction, theoretical integration, and the assessment of saturation, while reserving interpretive authority and theoretical responsibility for the researcher. These Commentaries of this Methods Dialogue respond to the accepted, revised version of the lead article by Schmitt et al. (2026), which incorporated feedback from open, collaborative reviews by established researchers. Following acceptance, the review teams provided four independent assessments of the value of GGT. Tomaino proposes that GGT is particularly suited for experimental researchers who are generating rich conversational data through AI‐mediated studies, as GGT can possibly reveal mechanisms, generate new research questions, and unearth competing explanations. Schweidel emphasizes the researcher's indispensable role as a “cognitive operator.” He acknowledges that GGT's traceability facilitates replication, digital‐twin exploration, and coordination across qualitative–quantitative researchers, but only if researchers resist sycophancy, cognitive offloading, and the temptation to delegate the entire process to an autonomous agent. Dolbec, Fischer, and Smith expand the focus on the responsibility of the GGT researcher, arguing that the ease of AI‐assisted analysis may create a “fallacy of facility” in which plausible output is mistaken for expertise. They propose that methodological simulacrums can produce polished but weakly grounded research unless investigators actively harness substantial qualitative method expertise to control AI's distorting capability. Finally, Puntoni and Schillewaert shift attention upstream from analysis to data collection. They argue that using AI moderation may relax the long‐standing separation between qualitative depth interviews and standardized variable assessment. If so, AI‐adaptive interviews could integrate sampling and analysis by offering a “living” grounded theory, while raising new questions about saturation and reproducibility. Together, these commentaries acknowledge that GGT could extend the reach of inductive inquiry and facilitate automated theorizing, but it is a method that demands critical judgment, transparent record‐keeping, and human control.
Stories persuade not only audiences, but their storytellers. For audiences, prior research documents modality matters: spoken stories are often more transporting and persuasive than written ones. For storytellers, we find a contrary result: storytellers are more transported and persuaded when they write rather than speak their stories. Although unpredicted by prior theory, we offer one explanation for this occurrence: structured thinking. We propose that, for storytellers, writing is better at promoting structured thinking, which facilitates storyteller transportation and persuasion. We further demonstrate that the effect of modality on the storyteller is moderated by story valence. The storyteller is persuaded in the direction of the story and thus exhibits more favorable evaluations after telling positive stories but more unfavorable evaluations after telling negative ones. These findings reveal that communication modality is an important factor in storyteller self-persuasion and open new directions for research on narratives, modality, and persuasion.
From choosing an established brand over a newcomer to deciding when to replace a product or commit to a subscription, consumers routinely make judgments about how much longer things will last. Across 24 studies (N = 9718), this research introduces and tests the continuity heuristic, an intuitive forecasting strategy in which consumers use how long something has lasted as a basis for predicting how long it will continue. This temporal extrapolation shapes judgments across a diverse set of consumer domains, including brand heritage, product obsolescence, subscription retention, and trend forecasting. Even when quality is held constant, and age is not explicitly mentioned, past duration predicts future longevity expectations. We propose a question-substitution account, where consumers faced with the difficult question "How long will it last?" often rely on the easier and more accessible "How long has it lasted?" This substitution explains why the effect weakens for technology products, where clear lifespan norms provide direct answers to the target question, and for expert consumers, who can draw on domain knowledge to estimate longevity without relying on past duration. This research contributes to the psychology of temporal judgment and provides marketers with a tool for predicting preference, loyalty, and perceived durability.
How do Islamic moral-spiritual meaning systems shape motivations for fitness consumption, and why do they sustain ongoing moral striving? Drawing on 13 months of ethnography and 17 interviews in a Tunisian gym, we show how Muslim gymgoers often interpret exercise through Tawba, the Islamic practice of repentance and return. Diet lapses, missed sessions, and bodily discomfort are folded into a recurring cycle of renewed intention, effort, and moral self-correction. This cycle also reshapes fitness capital. Effort gains legitimacy when read as sincere, modest, and restrained, while display-oriented practices such as selfies, branded visibility, and transformation narratives can become morally suspect. Coaches and peers stabilize these judgments by making bodily work socially legible. The findings extend goal-striving research by showing how religious meaning systems sustain persistence through repeated moral return, where fitness becomes valuable through proper orientation as much as visible progress.
We explore the relationship between gender identity, overconfidence, and investment risk-taking behaviors. We quantify overconfidence as a discrepancy between an individual's perceived and actual financial knowledge, and our empirical analysis reveals significant differences in overconfidence levels across gender identities. Consumers who identify as nonbinary exhibit significantly lower levels of financial overconfidence compared to individuals identifying as either male or female. The lower levels of overconfidence are attributed to a more modest self-assessment of financial knowledge rather than a difference in actual knowledge. Higher overconfidence is linked with a greater willingness to take on financial risks. Nonbinary individuals exhibit a considerably lower inclination to take risks in their investment decisions. While nonbinary individuals are more likely to experience mental health challenges, these do not explain the reduced levels of overconfidence and risk-taking. Moreover, the nonbinary pattern is not a generic minority effect.
Communicators often hedge. Consumers say a restaurant might have good mimosas or that a product is probably the best while Amazon suggests movies they think you'll like. But might these different hedges have different effects on persuasion? We suggest that (1) whether a hedge takes a personal (vs. general) perspective and (2) the likelihood suggested by a hedge both play important roles in determining hedging's persuasive impact. A multi-method investigation combining experiments with machine learning of millions of online reviews supports these hypotheses. Together, they demonstrate that the effects of both hedge perspective and hedge likelihood are driven by a common mechanism: perceived confidence. Hedges that involve personal perspective or higher likelihood increase persuasion because they suggest communicators are more confident. Moreover, we demonstrate that hedging can protect communicators from backlash without sacrificing persuasive impact and highlight that brands can leverage hedging's persuasive impact when speaking through anthropomorphized agents. This work contributes to the literature on language in marketing, showcases how subtle linguistic features impact perceived confidence, and has clear implications for anyone trying to be more persuasive.
Consistent with the standard model of time discounting, subscription firms typically offer introductory discounts early in the subscription. However, we demonstrate that consumers are more likely to prefer a delayed discount when the discount is expressed in the same unit as the recurring price (e.g., "$10, $10, $5"). The identical framing leads consumers to perceive the payments as a coherent sequence, making it easier to identify an improving pattern and project it forward, thereby lowering expectations of the post-promotion price. By contrast, when the discount is framed differently from the recurring price (e.g., "$10, $10, 50% off"), it is perceived as a segregated gain, and consumers revert to the standard preference for immediate benefits. Across four studies, we demonstrate this effect using actual online click-through behavior (Study 1) and identify the underlying mechanism: the preference for delayed discounts arises from lower future price expectations driven by sequence-continuation inferences (Study 2). Consistent with this account, the effect disappears when the basis for this inference is removed-either by disclosing the renewal price (Study 3) or by disrupting sequence coherence (Study 4). Four supplementary studies further generalize the findings across product categories and narrative pricing displays and rule out several alternative explanations.
Consumer activism is becoming increasingly common worldwide, but are all consumer groups as likely to engage in these practices? The current research investigates the presence of socioeconomic status (SES) differences in boycotting participation and explores the psychological processes underlying potential discrepancies. Results from four studies, including cross-national surveys, experiments, and lab-in-the-field evidence, show that low-SES consumers display a lower likelihood of boycotting companies than their high-SES peers. The phenomenon emerges across different measures, including self-reported intentions, past actions, and actual behaviors. This reduced inclination to boycott among the socioeconomically disadvantaged is driven by their reduced sense of control, which induces lower beliefs that consumption can be used as an effective instrument to enact change. These findings offer important contributions to the study of boycotting practices and shed new light on the complex relationship between socioeconomic conditions and consumer behavior.
Consumer impatience has long been examined through the lens of intertemporal choice, where patience is inferred from decisions to accept delayed rewards. Yet, this conceptualization captures only the choice to wait, not the experience of waiting. Sweeny's Process Model of Patience (PMP) shifts the focus from temporal preferences to temporal affect, defining impatience as a negatively valenced emotional response to objectionable delays and patience as the active regulation of this emotion. In this commentary, I bridge these two traditions by mapping the psychological drivers of intertemporal choice-affective urges, cognitive representations, construal, subjective time perception, and future-self connectedness-onto the mechanisms that shape waiting experiences. This decision-process integration of impatience reveals where the two perspectives converge, where they diverge, and why these distinctions matter for understanding consumer behavior. I propose several testable predictions illustrating how choice patience and process patience dissociate, how motivations and mental representations shift across the decision-waiting timeline, and how environmental cues can reduce uncertainty at choice yet heighten impatience during the wait. Together, these insights suggest a more complete temporal model of impatience-one that begins before the decision is made and continues throughout the delay that follows.
Although consumers who engage in the same sustainable behaviors objectively have the same environmental impact, this research finds that people's perceptions of that impact are subjective and systematically shaped by political ideology. Seven studies demonstrate that conservatives tend to perceive their sustainable actions to have less of a positive impact on the environment than liberals do, which predicts conservatives' lower engagement in sustainable behaviors. This effect occurs not just because of their own climate change beliefs, but also because of the lower observed prevalence of sustainable behaviors in their in-group. Consistent with this mechanism, when (a) the behavior is presented in a domain where it is seen as more prevalent among conservatives' ingroup members (i.e., health vs. sustainability), (b) the message emphasizes the prevalence of sustainable actions within the ingroup, or (c) impact is explicitly communicated, conservatives' perceptions of impact and their willingness to engage in sustainable behaviors increase. This work contributes to the literature on political ideology, highlighting effective ways to promote sustainable behavior across the political spectrum.
Patience has been a consistent source of interest and inspiration for generations of thinkers and writers. In this article, I delineate the tenets of a comprehensive framework for understanding patience, the process model of patience (Sweeny, Personality and Social Psychology Review , 2025, 29, 145), that positions impatience as a common and unpleasant emotion and patience as a targeted form of emotion regulation. I then outline potential applications of the model for consumer decisions, service experiences, and marketing contexts and close with practical recommendations to optimize consumer behavior in contexts where impatience is likely to arise.
Psychological empowerment plays a crucial role in motivating individuals to pursue their goals. This research explores a unique method to empower consumers in their goal pursuit: anthropomorphizing goals as dependent persons in need of care. Through three studies, including an incentive-compatible study and a field study conducted at a hypermarket, we demonstrate that viewing personal goals as dependent persons who require care and nurturance (e.g., presenting a goal as a dependent person in a health app) can significantly enhance goal pursuit (e.g., choosing healthy snacks) by boosting psychological empowerment. We find that this motivational boost does not occur when a goal is simply anthropomorphized as any person (Study 1), when it is depicted as a dependent object (Study 1), or when it is anthropomorphized as an independent person (Study 2). This research contributes to a deeper understanding of motivation in goal pursuit and offers practical implications for marketers. Specifically, by using marketing communications to frame goals as entities that require care, marketers can help individuals foster a more engaging and empowering relationship with their aspirations.
This research explores the paradoxical effects of two different root metaphors of time-as resource and as motion-on impatience. We first show a conceptual correspondence between the two root metaphors: experiences associated with little time are often perceived as similar to those associated with time passing quickly, and experiences associated with ample time are often perceived as similar to those associated with time passing slowly. However, people's impatience exhibits opposite patterns for the corresponding metaphors: while people are less willing to wait when they have little versus ample time, they are more willing to wait when they experience time passing quickly versus slowly. This paradoxical effect arises because corresponding metaphors have opposite effects on perceived control and anticipated valence of the waiting time, which in turn lead to variations in impatience. Four studies (plus two in the Appendices S4 and S5) conducted across online, lab, and field settings support these findings. By identifying the relationship between the root metaphors of time-as-motion and time-as-resource and their paradoxical effects on impatience, this research contributes to the literatures on temporal cognition and intertemporal choice, and to the broader literature on the role of metaphors in consumer decision-making.
Consumers often act to correct the wrongdoings of people close to them, such as family members or friends. The current research demonstrates that consumers may also engage in a variety of reparatory behaviors—from a simple apology to gift‐giving and tipping—to counter the misdeeds of in‐group strangers when their behavior threatens the reputation of their shared group identity. Across eight preregistered experiments, the present research demonstrates that when an in‐group member commits a wrongdoing in the presence of out‐group observers, fellow in‐group members experience a threat to the group's reputation. This reputational threat evokes feelings of embarrassment and a motivation to distance the group identity from the transgressor, prompting reparatory behaviors such as apologizing, gift‐giving, or tipping. These effects emerge across a range of social identities, including ethnicity, nationality, university affiliation, and sports team fandom. Importantly, this tendency is attenuated when other in‐group members have already taken action to restore the group's image. These findings reveal a powerful form of identity‐driven consumer behavior, highlighting how concerns about group reputation can drive individuals to act, even for the misdeeds of in‐group strangers.
Two commentaries by Tormala and Rucker and by Critcher and Galak offer complementary perspectives on our target article, Changing Beliefs versus Changing Behavior. Tormala and Rucker emphasize attitudes as proximal determinants of behavior, underscoring the importance of attitude strength and measurement compatibility. Critcher and Galak propose a contextual continuum of decision making that situates belief influence within unprompted, opportunity-based, and prompted behavioral contexts, illustrating how contextual factors shape the recruitment of beliefs for specific actions. In this response, we clarify the relations among beliefs, attitudes, and context; address the misconception that our model overemphasizes inferential reasoning; and extend the framework to integrate evaluative and contextual determinants of behavior. This synthesis offers a comprehensive account in which attitudes function as inferential products of belief processing, while contexts determine when and how these processes are activated.
