When engaging in corporate political activism (CPA), firms can use different cues (e.g., language and medium choices) to establish the permanence of their activism communications. Across six studies spanning a wide range of timely sociopolitical issues, the current research provides insights into how consumers respond to the relative permanence of a firm’s CPA communications. We show that more permanent (vs. temporary) CPA communications, as might be shared on a firm’s website, social media posts, or retail displays, signal greater firm commitment to the advocated issue, which in turn generates more positive downstream outcomes. Consistent with a mechanism grounded in firm commitment perceptions, the positive impact of communication permanence is attenuated in the presence of other diagnostic signals of firm commitment. Furthermore, we explore whether individual differences might influence consumer responses to such communication permanence, yielding two interrelated insights. First, firm commitment perceptions stemming from permanent CPA communications have a stronger effect on firm outcomes when consumers’ ideology aligns with the stance the firm takes. Second, holding stance alignment constant, the impact of CPA communication permanence appears more pronounced among liberal consumers, who react more strongly to cues of lower firm commitment (e.g., temporary communications).

Consumers are more easily persuaded by people who are similar to them in looks, behavior, and beliefs. Does similarity's effect on persuasion extend to similarity in how people sound? The authors explore how similarity in vocal timbre influences consumer choice. Using machine learning, they generate an objective measure of vocal similarity (VS) between an individual consumer and a spokesperson using mel-frequency cepstral coefficients to capture vocal timbre. First, using data from 7,002 entrepreneur–investor combinations on Shark Tank , the authors demonstrate the effect of VS on persuasion in investment pitches. Then, in 2,091 Kickstarter campaigns, they find that when a spokesperson's voice is more similar to a large audience's average voice, this results in higher persuasion, measured by fundraised amount and campaign success—a result driven by VS. However, these effects are attenuated when external signals of campaign credibility are present. Finally, in four laboratory studies, the authors show that VS with a spokesperson or recommender leads to greater trust in their competence and positively influences persuasion. The authors find that objective and subjective VS have similar results, with objective similarity mapping onto subjective similarity. They provide a deeper understanding of consumer–spokesperson interactions, including new tools for vocal analytics.

Animal adoption campaigns increasingly rely on visual imagery to attract attention and motivate helping behavior, yet little is known about how animals' emotional displays function as persuasive signals in advertising. Across five studies, this research examines how and why animals' facial expressions shape adoption-related responses, and when these effects attenuate or reverse. Drawing on theories of self-focused decision-making, emotional contagion, and cognitive inference, we propose that adoption is a high-commitment helping context that tends to invite self-focused evaluation, thereby privileging emotional cues that forecast positive personal outcomes. Using archival data and controlled experiments, we demonstrate that animals displaying happy (vs. sad) facial expressions attract more click-through interest and elicit higher adoption intention. We further show that this effect is jointly driven by two parallel psychological processes: positive affective responses and favorable cognitive inferences, which together enhance anticipated self-benefit from adoption. Importantly, we identify two boundary conditions. Conceptually, experimentally shifting attention away from the self toward the animal weakens the happy-expression advantage. Practically, helping mode moderates the effect: happy expressions are more persuasive in adoption contexts, whereas sad expressions are more effective in motivating monetary donation. Together, these findings advance emotional persuasion theory and offer guidance for aligning emotional cues with the motivational structure of helping contexts.

Technology makes it possible for researchers and practitioners to change the orientation of scales. Scales can be oriented horizontally from left to right with values increasing (0 left-10 right) or decreasing (10 left-0 right), or vertically from top to bottom with values increasing (0 top-10 bottom) or decreasing (10 top-0 bottom). Does the congruence of a scale's spatial orientation (whether it is horizontal vs. vertical) and magnitude orientation (the direction in which values increase) influence survey responses? Seven preregistered experiments (N = 6,002) and four preregistered supplemental experiments (N = 5,674) examine the effect of a scale's spatial-magnitude congruence on net promoter scores (NPSs). The results show that scales with incongruent spatial-magnitude orientations result in lower NPS ratings than those with congruent ones. We propose that horizontal and vertical spatial orientations are associated with a specific magnitude orientation in the mind. Horizontal scales feel more intuitive with increasing (0 left-10 right) versus decreasing (10 left-0 right) magnitude. Vertical scales feel more intuitive with decreasing (10 top-0 bottom) versus increasing (0 top-10 bottom) magnitudes. Researchers and managers designing surveys to measure consequential constructs such as NPS should not change the spatial-magnitude orientation of their scales across companies, survey platforms, or time-such changes can render their data less comparable.

This study investigated how emotional events-specifically experiences of sadness (vs. happiness)-influence individuals' mental visualization processes, with a focus on how they alter perceived color chroma in visual imagery. Drawing on emotion regulation theory, we propose that people are more motivated to forget sad experiences than happy ones, and this tendency influences how such events are mentally visualized. Specifically, individuals tend to mentally represent sad events with lower color chroma (i.e., reduced vividness, intensity, or saturation) compared to happy events. Results from three experiments involving 939 participants support our theorization (data collected in 2018-2023). Experiment 1 extends prior research by showing that participants mentally represent sad experiences in lower color chroma than happy experiences. This suggests that the color-emotion association exists not only in stimuli-based processing but also in mental visualization. Experiment 2 identifies the mediating role of the motivation to forget the emotional experience in the causal relationship between emotions and color chroma representation. Experiment 3 further indicates that the effect of emotions on color chroma is mitigated when individuals are explicitly prompted to forget emotional experiences. This research demonstrates the role of motivational processes in shaping mental visualization and provides a novel and verifiable explanation for the association between color chroma and emotions documented in the emotion literature (Pazda et al., 2024). (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).

This article details the theoretical foundation of haptics in consumer research. We structure the review using a continuum from proximal touch-based interactions to increasingly distal interactions through devices, imagery, or language use. We begin with a focus on product/object touch in marketing highlighting touch for haptic information, touch for haptic pleasure, and touch for nonhaptic functional reasons. We then elaborate on research considering work compensating for actual touch through various mechanisms including device-mediated touch and imagery processing. Next, we examine interpersonal touch followed by a discussion on touch in sensory words and textual paralanguage. The authors note various avenues for future research in haptics with the aim to encourage research in consumer psychology and marketing.

Packaging waste makes up more than 10% of the landfilled waste in the United States. While consumers often want to make environmentally friendly product choices, we find that their perceptions of the environmental friendliness of product packaging may systematically deviate from its objective environmental friendliness. Eight studies (N = 4,103) document the perceived environmental friendliness (PEF) bias whereby consumers judge plastic packaging with additional paper to be more environmentally friendly than identical plastic packaging without the paper. The PEF bias is driven by consumers’ “paper = good, plastic = bad” beliefs and by proportional reasoning, wherein packaging with a greater paper-to-plastic proportion is judged as more environmentally friendly. We further show that the PEF bias impacts consumers’ willingness to pay and product choice. Importantly, this bias can be mitigated by a “minimal packaging sticker” intervention, which increases the environmental friendliness perceptions of plastic-only packaging, rendering plastic-packaged products to be preferable to their plastic-plus-paper-packaged counterparts. This research contributes to the packaging literature in marketing and to research on sustainability while offering practical implications for managers and public policy officials.

Respondents in online panels often lack motivation when completing research questionnaires. We propose a method to improve their motivation. In many online survey platforms, questionnaires start with a relatively trivial task (e.g., self-identification or responding to screener demographic questions). We show that bringing attention to the completion of these trivial tasks can increase participants’ motivation in the subsequent main task; without this completion cue, the completion of the trivial task tends to go unnoticed. Using different trivial tasks (e.g., providing demographic information, stapling a questionnaire) and main tasks (e.g., commenting about a situation, recalling information), four experiments demonstrate what we call the “trivial-task motivation effect”. We further show that trivial tasks need not be irritants and may be added to surveys, along with a completion cue, to boost motivation. Our research presents an easily implemented and low-cost method to increase motivation in surveys.

Past research suggests that conservatives are usually more threat-sensitive than liberals are. Yet during the COVID-19 pandemic, conservatives consistently underestimated the risk from the virus. To reconcile this paradox, we introduce a model of identity-based risk perception (IRP). This model posits that risk perceptions depend not only on objective risk but also on people's political identity and whether the risk pertains to their group identity (group risk) versus individual identity (individual risk). When asked about the group risk posed by a threat ("How many Americans will die of COVID-19?"), conservatives focus on their national pride and underestimate the risk of contracting the virus compared to liberals. However, when asked about individual risk from the same threat ("What is the probability of an individual dying of COVID-19?"), conservatives focus on individual mortality threat and overestimate the risk of succumbing to the virus compared to liberals. Three national surveys support the IRP model.

This research documents systematic gender performance differences (GPD) at a top business school using a unique administrative data set and survey of students. The findings show that women's grades are 11% of a standard deviation lower in quantitative courses than those of men with similar academic aptitude and demographics, and men's grades are 23% of a standard deviation lower in nonquantitative courses than those of comparable women. The authors discuss and test for different reasons to explain this finding. They show that a female instructor significantly cuts down GPD for quantitative courses by raising the relative grades of female students. In addition, female instructors increase women's interest and performance expectations in these courses and are perceived as role models by their female students. These results provide support for a gender stereotype process for GPD and show that faculty can serve as powerful exemplars to challenge gender stereotypes and increase student achievement. The authors discuss several important implications of these findings for business schools and for society.

This review of mental imagery research has the core objective of fostering more research on the topic of sensory imagery. The review is organized around a conceptual framework highlighting (a) how mental imagery is formed, (b) the elicitation and elaboration of mental imagery, (c) the multi‐modal nature of sensory imagery, and (d) the consumer behavior consequences of mental imagery. This conceptual framework provides many new lenses through which researchers can view prior findings, and thereby motivates innovative new research ideas. Future research directions are provided in each section of the review, with additional unexplored opportunities presented in a final section.

Cause marketing (CM) typically involves for-profit firms donating part of their sales revenue to a charity, with the hope that this will increase their revenue. We argue that it is important for a regulator to monitor firms' CM activities, and to assess how differences in the enforcement of CM laws impact the CM practice by firms. Our analytical model uses a Stackelberg leader-follower game that endogenizes the regulator's decision to enforce CM. The firm then decides whether to truthfully declare or overstate the amount it contributes to charity (and if overstate: by how much). We find the following results in equilibrium under different conditions: (i) CM campaigns are a win-win-win situation - they increase profit for the firm while being truthful, generate larger donations for the charity, and generate a cause marketing surplus for the regulator, resulting in doing well while doing good, (ii) the best response of the firm is to be strategic, even when the regulator is strict with monitoring, (iii) the regulator itself decides not to monitor CM, even though it knows that this results in untruthful behavior by firms. When we endogenize the extent of overstatement, we find that the firm tends to be strategic by overstating donation percentage, whether the regulator is strict or not. As the proportion of unsophisticated consumers (who believe a firm's claims, whether truthful or not) increases, the donation proportion decreases in general, and the overstatement level increases when the regulator is lenient and decreases when the regulator is strict. In equilibrium, the regulator is strict if the market size is large, and lenient otherwise. A survey with consumers supports key modeling assumptions regarding consumers' lack of knowledge of CM laws.(c) 2022 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Firms of varying size can produce the same product. Do consumers make inferences about products based on firm size? We focus on perceptions of product naturalness and show, in four studies, that products made by smaller firms are perceived to be more natural — whether they are directly experienced (study 1) or seen in ads (study 2). Additionally, we show that the association of firm size and naturalness is held non=consciously (study 3), and also consciously (study 2); and that it impacts purchase intention (studies 2 and 4). Our research has many implications for firms conveying product naturalness. Importantly, it highlights the need to explore possible associations between firm characteristics and product perceptions.

There has been much debate on the need for preregistering experimental studies. Opinions differ with some people believing that “pre‐registration should be required—for us to believe the results of papers,” and others believing that “pre‐registration makes no difference to science and just adds work.” This research dialogue brings differing viewpoints together, in an open academic dialogue. Two target articles and two commentaries discuss what pre‐registration does for replicability of studies, and what cost it adds on authors and reviewers. Additionally, in my introduction to the research dialogue, I deliberate on the need for synergy between our journals, review teams, authors, and institutions, in order for any new policies on pre‐registration to be successfully adopted.

AbstractFood has a daily impact on all consumers, requiring frequent evaluations and decisions pre‐consumption, during, and post‐consumption. Given the number of consumer interactions and the complexity of the food consumption process, researchers have increasingly studied food from both a sensory standpoint and cognitive standpoint. In this review, we create a framework for this existing research. Specifically, we discuss research addressing the key sensory drivers of taste perceptions and consumption, including all five senses: vision, olfaction, audition, haptic, and/or taste. We also identify key cognitive contextual drivers of taste perception and consumption within a marketing context, including social cues, atmospherics, branding, and advertising. Building from the extant literature, we generate and propose areas for future food‐related research.

Journal of Consumer PsychologyVolume 30, Issue 1 p. 178-180 EditorialFree Access It Should Not Take a Funeral: An Introduction to the Dialogue on the Self-Control Construct Aradhna Krishna, Aradhna Krishna University of MichiganSearch for more papers by this author Aradhna Krishna, Aradhna Krishna University of MichiganSearch for more papers by this author First published: 23 December 2019 https://doi.org/10.1002/jcpy.1143Citations: 2 Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Aradhna Krishna, Dwight F. Benton of Marketing, University of Michigan, 701 Tappan Street, Ann Arbor, MI 48109, USA. Electronic mail may be sent to aradhna@umich.edu AboutSectionsPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onEmailFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditWechat TARGET ARTICLE: "Exerting Self-Control ≠ Sacrificing Pleasure" by Dr. Joachim Vosgerau, Irene Scopelliti, and Young-Eun Huh COMMENTARY #1: "Reflective Self-Control in Self-Control Scholarship: A Peircean Analysis" by Cait Lamberton COMMENTARY #2: "The importance of construct validity in consumer research" by Daniel Mochon and Janet Schwartz RESPONSE: "Response to Commentaries on the Exerting Self-Control ≠ Sacrificing Pleasure" by Irene Scopelliti, Dr. Joachim Vosgerau, and Young-Eun Huh New ideas must be promoted and old ones challenged. This is how science evolves and paradigms shift (Kuhn, 1962). Unfortunately, if this is left to happen organically—that is, via the competition of ideas—the evolution may be very slow. For new ideas to flourish, at the very extreme, it may actually take the death of a prominent scientist (Azoulay, Fons-Rosen, & Graff Zivin, 2019). Or, to quote Max Planck, "A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it." I believe that the field of consumer psychology is more open and accepting of new ideas than the life sciences field which Azoulay et al. studied (and, clearly, we do not want any funerals or early retirements). However, we still have a long way to go. Dialogues, such as this one, allow for re-examination of accepted theories, methods, and results, and permit novel ideas to transform entrenched ways of thinking. This is not the first dialogue of this nature—for an earlier example, see Gal and Rucker's (2018) inquiry into the evidence for loss aversion. In the same spirit of revisiting and critically assessing established modes of research, this dialogue by Vosgerau, Scopelliti, and Huh (VSH) focuses on the self-control concept and the construct validity of its measure. VSH's target article is then commented upon by Mochon and Schwartz, and by Lamberton. Vosgerau, Scopelliti, and Huh criticize the often-used conceptualization of self-control as "abstinence from hedonic consumption," and its related measurement. Instead, based upon on self-control theories in economics and finance, they define self-control as "the sacrifice of immediate, short term gratification in service of more important, long term benefits." Building up from this definition, they argue that "resolving the conflict in favor of immediate gratification will hence lead to regretting one's choice," and therefore, "the expectation that one will regret yielding to a temptation is hence a clear marker that the behavior involved represents a self-control failure." They look at 125 articles across 12 journals of relevance to us and show that in nearly all (120 of them), the stimuli representing self-control failure were hedonic foods, 34.4% as chocolate cake, chips, and ice cream, also described in these articles as "unhealthy, tempting, indulgent, affectively superior, tasty, vice, or want foods." In 52.2% of the studies in these articles, self-control was indicated through a choice between two foods, one of which was hedonic (choosing the hedonic food meant a loss of self-control), whereas it was indicated through the amount of hedonic food eaten in an ad libitum task (more suggested lower self-control). The implicit assumption was that choosing a hedonic food (or having more of a hedonic food) implied choosing a short-term taste goal over a long-term health goal and would result in anticipated regret. But, in none of these articles was anticipated regret measured, and only a handful measured regret at all (postdecision regret). VSH then present two studies of their own, conducted for this target article. In the first, they study whether people's understanding of "self-control failure" maps onto choosing hedonism over utilitarianism and/or to whether the decision violates a superordinate long-term goal, which creates anticipated regret. They conduct the second study using real choices in Korea and show that students who face a self-control conflict, in choosing to go to a movie versus receiving a pen, experience higher anticipated regret compared with those who do not face such a conflict (the self-control conflict is created when the movie is close in time to an upcoming examination). VSH generously leave us with many open questions for future research, such as boundary conditions for anticipating regret and individual differences in anticipating regret (e.g., are good self-controllers more likely to anticipate regret—and therefore more likely to adhere to the superordinate goal?). Lamberton discusses these issues further in her commentary. She identifies three risks with VSH's measure of self-control through anticipated regret (remember that per VSH, higher self-control means choosing against anticipated regret)—one of these risks discusses how easier behavior (lower self-control) may, in fact, be associated with choosing against anticipated regret, for example, whether to confess to a partner after having an affair, knowing that this may result in losing the partner. I leave the reader to peruse Lamberton's commentary for details of the other two risks. More broadly, Lamberton suggests that VSH's definition of self-control through anticipated regret represents "consumption self-control," whereas, an alternate definition by Peirce (Hartshorne and Weiss, 1934) characterizes reflexive self-control, which operates independent of anticipated regret. Together, VSH's and Lamberton's discussions indicate that researchers should explicitly specify how they define self-control and use pretests for ensuring that it is indeed this definition they are capturing in their measures. Mochon and Schwartz's (MS) commentary generalizes the argument of VSH. They make a case for the importance of establishing construct validity of measures used to capture specific concepts and provide two additional examples beyond the self-control example in VSH. MS's first example is of "choice overload." Unlike self-control in the target article, here, the independent variable, and not the dependent variable, is the operationalized construct. MS suggests that choice overload could be conceptualized through its underlying psychological construct (a negative state elicited by the choice context), but is typically conceptualized by the number of options in the choice set. But, are the two the same, and does the latter always result in the former? The second example is of "loss aversion," which has also garnered a different kind of dialogue in JCP (the Gal & Rucker, 2018 dialog discussed earlier), about whether the evidence for loss aversion is compelling. MS points out that the underlying concern is about whether empirical evidence to demonstrate a particular construct in one context can subsequently be used indiscriminately in other contexts to indicate the same construct. VSH responds to the two commentaries but focus their response on Lamberton's critique. In addition to the points these authors raise, I want to raise another issue regarding construct validity in consumer psychology. There is a conundrum I have always had regarding the diffusion of measurement scales in our field, that is, how accepted they get—how used they are in further research. I find that scales seem to be equally well accepted, whether they are rigorously designed and proposed as stand-alone papers (let us call them rigorously designed scales), or designed in a relatively ad-hoc manner within a (generally) hypothetico-deductive paper (let us call these convenience scales). Rigorously designed scales would have tests of discriminant, convergent, and nomological validity, among other things. Examples of such scales are the Need For Touch scale (Peck & Childers, 2003), the Propensity To Plan scale (Lynch, Netemeyer, Spiller, & Zammit, 2009), and the GREEN scale (Haws, Winterich, & Naylor, (2014). Convenience scales, on the other hand, are typically designed with little testing, because other scales to capture a construct do not exist, and the paper needs a scale to capture that construct. These scales can be simple 3 or 5 item scales. I will not add to the heat in this dialogue by giving examples of other authors here; with my coauthors' permission, I will give the example of my own perceived movement scale (Cian, Krishna, & Elder, 2014) as one such convenience scale. Cian, Elder, and I constructed this scale to measure whether our experiment stimuli represented low versus high perceived movement, which was the independent variable—in other words, the scale was used for a manipulation check. Perceived movement was a relatively new concept at that time, and we did not find other appropriate scales for it. We created a very simple two-item scale to measure perceived movement, and since then, our scale has been used in other research as well. However, we will openly acknowledge that it is not developed with the same rigor as the first set of scales. Clearly, a more rigorously designed scale would have higher construct validity, which would also result in greater robustness of findings and likelihood of replication. Unfortunately, I think most of the new scales developed in consumer psychology work are convenience scales. [I acknowledge that a hypothetico-deductive paper, cannot at the same time, be a scale development paper since the latter is a full manuscript in itself; I just wish to point out here that the rigorously created scales and the convenience scales are treated with the same reverence in our field, when they should not.] Between all these issues regarding the construct validity of concepts—the methods, measures, and stimuli used for our constructs—the dialogue leaves us with the dismaying conclusion that a vast number of studies in consumer psychology spread across many subfields may not be examining the construct they suggest they are, potentially undermining the validity of the research findings (and contributing to replication problems). The constructs examined in this dialogue are just examples, and the problem is more far-reaching. But, to revert to my initial thought, that is exactly what we should be doing—questioning our paradigms and practices, even if the result of this introspection is disturbing. That is the only way in which science can evolve. But, on a more constructive note, the dialogue also suggests that there are certain things we can agree on. For instance, we should pay more attention to construct validity—defining what a construct that we use means to us, pretesting our measures to see whether they capture these constructs, even going back to "source authors" on established constructs to see if subsequent operationalizations actually fit, reading and writing papers with a focus on construct validity at least as much as on statistical precision, and understanding that the results of even a highly powered preregistered study are ambiguous if our construct validity was weak to begin with. Moving on to the bigger question of entrenched ideas, we need to think about how entrenchment occurs, and how we can cut through it. Perhaps, it occurs because the reviewers are part of the coauthor circle of a senior academic whose work the article challenges; but, they are even more likely to occur because reviewers are unwilling (or unable) to think beyond entrenched ideas, especially those of established researchers. Journals need to be more cognizant of these possibilities. I have faith that we can make changes and that we do not need a funeral. References Azoulay, P., Fons-Rosen, C., & Graff Zivin, J. S. (2019). Does science advance one funeral at a time? American Economic Review, 109(8), 2889– 2920. https://doi.org/10.1257/aer.20161574 Cian, L., Krishna, A., & Elder, R. S. (2014). This logo moves me: Dynamic imagery from static images. Journal of Marketing Research, 51(2), 184– 197. https://doi.org/10.1509/jmr.13.0023 Gal, D., & Rucker, D. D. (2018). The loss of loss aversion: Will it loom larger than its gain? Journal of Consumer Psychology, 28(3), 497– 516. https://doi.org/10.1002/jcpy.1047 C. Hartshorne, & P. Weiss (1934). (Eds.). Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce: Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Haws, K. L., Winterich, K. P., & Naylor, R. W. (2014). Seeing the world through GREEN-tinted glasses: Green consumption values and responses to environmentally friendly products. Journal of Consumer Psychology, 24(3), 336– 354. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jcps.2013.11.002 Kuhn, T. (1962). The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. p. 54. Lynch, J. G., Netemeyer, R. G., Spiller, S. A., & Zammit, A. (2009). A generalizable scale of propensity to plan: The long and the short of planning for time and for money. Journal of Consumer Research, 37(1), 108– 128. Peck, J., & Childers, T. L. (2003). Individual differences in haptic information processing: The "need for touch" scale. Journal of Consumer Research, 30(3), 430– 442. Volume30, Issue1January 2020Pages 178-180 ReferencesRelatedInformation