ABSTRACT Existing literature often treats the intention–behaviour gap in sustainable food consumption as a single breakdown between intention and action. The present research adopts a process‐oriented perspective, arguing that consumers may disengage at multiple stages when evaluating sustainable food products. Drawing on the Hierarchy of Effects model and the moment‐by‐moment analysis capability of consumer biometric methodologies, we propose that initial attention to sustainability cues is necessary but insufficient to elicit positive emotional responses or support sustainable food purchase decisions. Instead, consumers must become emotionally engaged with the product for sustainability information to progress toward purchase intention. Across four studies, we show that emotional engagement, rather than attention alone, drives purchase intention for sustainable food products. We further demonstrate that illusory superiority bias can reduce emotional engagement because consumers who perceive themselves as more sustainable than others may feel less motivated to engage further with sustainable products. However, when this illusion is corrected, consumers may experience contempt in response to the corrective feedback and in turn, increase emotional engagement with sustainable products as a form of self‐affirmation.
ABSTRACT Prior research has shown that auspicious product names can enhance consumer attitudes and purchase intentions, but less is known about the psychological processes and relational conditions through which such culturally symbolic names influence gift choice. This research examines how auspicious naming shapes tourists' decisions to purchase souvenirs as gifts. Across four studies and two supplementary experiments, we show that auspicious naming enhances gift purchase intention through two mechanisms: gift‐social goal congruence and gift‐selection self‐efficacy. Relational closeness strengthens the indirect effect through gift‐social goal congruence, whereas recipient relative status strengthens both indirect pathways. Together, these findings show how culturally symbolic product names operate in socially situated gift‐giving by shaping both meaning‐purpose fit and gift‐selection capability, and by showing how these processes vary across giver‐recipient relationships.
ABSTRACT Consumers often decide what to share by estimating how much others will value a piece of content. We show that these estimates are systematically miscalibrated for emotionally valenced material. Across four studies spanning controlled tasks and naturalistic contexts, people overestimated others’ valuation of valenced, especially negative, content relative to others’ self‐reports and willingness to pay. Process evidence indicates that valence makes highly affected exemplars salient; focusing on these recipients inflates beliefs about audiences’ valuations, which in turn predicts higher sharing intentions. A lightweight focus‐switching prompt that asks senders to consider a specific close friend reduces this bias to narrow the valenced–neutral sharing gap. These findings recast the spread of valenced content as a judgment bias about what audience value, not reducible to other established drivers of sharing, integrating value‐based sharing with projection biases in consumer judgment. Managerially, interface prompts and audience‐specification defaults can rebalance sharing toward content that audiences actually value, with implications for engagement quality, customer decisions, and consumer welfare.
ABSTRACT AI–enabled products increasingly delegate decision authority to autonomous systems, yet consumer responses to such autonomy depend on whether users retain meaningful control and how threatening the technology is perceived to be. Drawing on both Technology Threat Avoidance Theory (TTAT) and a risk–benefit appraisal perspective, this research examines how AI autonomy and user control shape consumer responses under different levels of perceived technological threat. Across one qualitative study and three experiments, the findings reveal distinct appraisal patterns. Under high perceived technological threat, AI autonomy and user control interact to shape perceived product risk, with greater autonomy associated with lower risk when user control is high, which in turn influences consumer responses. Under low perceived technological threat, greater AI autonomy enhances perceived relative benefit, which in turn promotes favorable consumer responses. A within‐category manipulation of technological threat provides a more controlled test of these patterns. The research also extends the evidence beyond purchase and usage intentions by examining product choice, information seeking, test‐driving decisions, and willingness to pay. Overall, this research provides a threat‐contingent account of consumer responses to AI autonomy by highlighting the role of retained user control under technological threat and identifying distinct risk‐ and benefit‐based appraisal pathways across threat contexts.
ABSTRACT Consumers are becoming increasingly attentive to healthy eating and the caloric content of their food. However, when judging a food's calories, they often lack sufficient knowledge or objective information and therefore rely on marketplace cues to make subjective evaluations. Although smile cues are widely used in food marketing, little is known about how consumers' dietary restraint shapes the calorie‐related inferences they draw from such cues. Across five studies, we show that, for foods that are inherently indulgent or can meaningfully be construed in indulgence‐related terms, smile cues increase perceived indulgence, which in turn leads to higher calorie perceptions more strongly when dietary restraint is higher or situationally activated. Extending the focal calorie perception process to downstream behaviors, we further show that consumers were less likely to choose foods with a smile cue when dietary restraint is activated than not. These findings contribute to the literature on food calorie judgment, smile, and dietary restraint.
