This article addresses a simple theoretical question of high substantive relevance: What makes a consumption experience special in a consumer's mind? To answer this question, the authors report an extensive multimethod investigation involving a grounded theory analysis of numerous consumer narratives and in-depth interviews, a field survey, a scale development study, a natural language processing (NLP) analysis of more than 3 million Yelp reviews, a preregistered multifactor causal experiment (and its preregistered replication), a blind comparison of hundreds of matched visual Instagram posts by third-party observers, and several small application studies. The findings converge in identifying three major psychological pillars of what makes consumption experiences feel special to consumers, each pillar involving different facets: (a) uniqueness, which arises from the rarity, novelty, irreproducibility, personalization, exclusivity, ephemerality, and surpassing of expectations of the experience; (b) meaningfulness, which pertains to the personal significance of the experience in terms of symbolism, relationships, self-affirmation, and self-transformation; and (c) authenticity, which relates to the perceived genuineness and realness of the experience in terms of its psychological proximity to some original source, iconicity, human sincerity, and connection to nature. As illustrated in the General Discussion, the findings have important substantive implications for the engineering of hedonic consumption experiences.

Sharing knowledge is a basic tenet of the scientific community, yet publication bias arising from the reluctance or inability to publish negative or null results remains a long-standing and deep-seated problem, albeit one that varies in severity between disciplines and study types. Recognizing that previous endeavors to address the issue have been fragmentary and largely unsuccessful, this Consensus View proposes concrete and concerted measures that major stakeholders can take to create and incentivize new pathways for publishing negative results. Funders, research institutions, publishers, learned societies, and the research community all have a role in making this an achievable norm that will buttress public trust in science.

The assessment of consumer scholarship must move beyond a mere counting of the number of "A"s on a researcher's CV to include at least some measure of impact. To facilitate a broader assessment of scholarship in consumer research, we provide detailed statistics on the productivity and citation impact of the field's 340 main gatekeepers: the editors, associate editors, and editorial board members of the Journal of Consumer Research and the Journal of Consumer Psychology. In addition, we introduce a new metric, called the p-index, which can be interpreted as an indicator of a researcher's propensity for thought leadership. Using this metric, we show that productivity and thought leadership do not necessarily go hand in hand in consumer research and that a combination of the two is a good predictor of the level of esteem that consumer scholars enjoy among their peers and of the receipt of major career awards. Our analyses provide greater transparency into how productivity, citation impact, and propensity for thought leadership are currently distributed among prominent consumer scholars. Furthermore, the detailed descriptive statistics reported can serve as useful benchmarks against which other consumer researchers' records may be meaningfully compared.

In this commentary, I propose a “big-picture” view of what good science is as a framework for evaluating scientific practices in consumer research. A big-picture view of science recognizes that scientific practices are not ends in themselves but tools to be used in the service of six epistemic ideals: veridicality, precision, transparency, generalizability, relevance, and insight. It is through a multidimensional contribution to these epistemic ideals that various scientific practices enable the production of evidence that is not only trustworthy but also useful. From this big-picture perspective, Krefeld-Schwalb and Scheibehenne’s results provide a decidedly mixed report card about the state of scientific practices in consumer research.

The experience of fun plays a major role in the consumer society. Drawing on a grounded theory approach, we advance a psychological theory of consumer fun. Through an integration of in-depth interviews, narrative analyses, controlled experiments, structural equation modeling, and a photo-ethnography, our multimethod investigation makes four main contributions. First, we show that the experience of fun rests on the combination of two psychological pillars: hedonic engagement and a sense of liberation. Fun is an experience of liberating engagement—a temporary release from psychological restriction via a hedonically engaging activity. Second, we identify four situational facilitators—novelty, social connectedness, spontaneity, and spatial/temporal boundedness—that promote the experience of fun through their effects on hedonic engagement and the sense of liberation. Third, we show that although the psychology of fun is not consumption specific, there is an intimate connection between fun and consumption. Finally, we clarify the relation and distinction between fun and happiness. We discuss implications for our understanding of consumption experiences, business practices related to the engineering of fun, and consumers’ own pursuits of fun and happiness.

In this commentary on Simmons, Nelson, and Simonsohn (this issue), we examine their rationale for pre‐registration within the broader perspective of what good science is. We agree that there is potential benefit in a system of pre‐registration if implemented selectively. However, we believe that other tools of open science such as the full sharing of study materials and open access to underlying data, provide most of the same benefits—and more (i.e., the prevention of outright fraud)—without risking the potential adverse consequences of a system of pre‐registration. This is why we favor these other means of controlling type I error and fostering transparency. Direct replication, as opposed to conceptual replication, should be encouraged as well.

To address widespread perceptions of a reproducibility crisis in the social sciences, a growing number of scholars recommend the systematic preregistration of empirical studies. The purpose of this article is to contribute to an epistemological dialogue on the value of preregistration in consumer research by identifying the limitations, drawbacks, and potential adverse effects of a preregistration system. After a brief review of some of the implementation challenges that commonly arise with preregistration, we raise three levels of issues with a system of preregistration. First, we identify its limitations as a means of advancing consumer knowledge, thus questioning the sufficiency of preregistration in promoting good consumer science. Second, we elaborate on why consumer science can progress even in the absence of preregistration, thereby also questioning the necessity of preregistration in promoting good consumer science. Third, we discuss serious potential adverse effects of preregistration, both at the individual researcher level and at the level of the field as a whole. We conclude by offering a broader perspective on the narrower role that preregistration can play within the general pursuit of building robust and useful knowledge about consumers.

This article presents new conceptual and managerial insights about consumer experiences of positive emotions in the marketplace and how to engineer these emotional experiences for business purposes. Specifically, we provide an in-depth conceptual analysis of three positive emotions that are of high relevance for marketers: (1) consumer pride, (2) consumer excitement, and (3) consumer relaxation. Through a systematic deconstruction of numerous consumer accounts of emotional experiences, combined with a careful theoretical analysis, we (a) codify how these emotions typically arise in consumption contexts, (b) identify their primary drivers and moderators in marketplace settings, including retail environments, and (c) explain how these theoretical insights can be used to engineer pride, excitement, and relaxation in consumption journeys.

In light of consumers’ growing dependence on their smartphones, this article investigates the nature of the relationship that consumers form with their smartphone and its underlying mechanisms. We propose that in addition to obvious functional benefits, consumers in fact derive emotional benefits from their smartphone, in particular, feelings of psychological comfort and, if needed, actual stress relief. In other words, in a sense, smartphones are not unlike “adult pacifiers.” This psychological comfort arises from a unique combination of properties that turn smartphones into a reassuring presence for their owners: the portability of the device, its personal nature, the subjective sense of privacy experienced while on the device, and the haptic gratification it affords. Results from one large-scale field study and three laboratory experiments support the proposed underlying mechanisms and document downstream consequences of the psychological comfort that smartphones provide. The findings show, for example, that (a) in moments of stress, consumers exhibit a greater tendency to seek out their smartphone (study 2); and (b) engaging with one’s smartphone provides greater stress relief than engaging in the same activity with a comparable device such as one’s laptop (study 3) or a similar smartphone belonging to someone else (study 4).

Although consumer behavior theory has traditionally regarded evaluations as instrumental to consumer choice, in reality consumers often assess and express what they like and dislike even when there is no decision at stake. Why are consumers so eager to express their evaluations when there is no ostensible purpose for doing so? In this research, we advance the thesis that this is because consumers derive an inherent pleasure from assessing and expressing their likes and dislikes. In support of this thesis, the results of seven studies show that compared to a variety of simple and commonplace control judgments, assessing and expressing one's likes and dislikes results in greater task enjoyment. This occurs because externalizing one's evaluations enables a form of self-expression that appears to be deep and global. These findings have important implications for marketers and policy makers.

Previous articleNext article FreeConsumer Emotions in the MarketplaceIntroduction to Special Issue: Consumer Emotions in the MarketplaceMichel Tuan Pham and Leonard LeeMichel Tuan Pham Search for more articles by this author and Leonard Lee Search for more articles by this author Michel Tuan Pham ([email protected]) is the Kravis Professor of Business in Marketing at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Business; Leonard Lee is Dean's Chair and associate professor of marketing at National University of Singapore, Business School.PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreThat feelings and emotions are an integral part of human life is an incontestable truism. An abundance of research from a wide variety of disciplines—including but not limited to social psychology, developmental psychology, consumer psychology, organizational behavior, behavioral economics, and neuroscience—demonstrates the pivotal role that affect plays in shaping people’s perceptions, thoughts, judgments, decisions, motivations, and behaviors.In particular, research in the last 20–30 years made substantial inroads into uncovering and understanding fundamental aspects of feelings and emotions, such as the multidimensional structure of affect (Plutchik 1980; Russell 1980, 2003; Lindquist et al. 2012), the conscious and nonconscious regulation of affect (Gross 2014; Chen and Pham 2019), and the consequences of relying on affect in judgment and decision-making (Bechara, Damasio, and Damasio 2000; Pham 2007; Slovic et al. 2007; Lee, Amir, and Ariely 2009; Pham et al. 2015). In consumer research, a great deal of work explores and documents the essential influence of feelings and emotions in numerous consumption domains—from shopping (Heilman, Nakamoto, and Rao 2002; Argo, Dahl, and Morales 2006) to risk-taking (Loewenstein et al. 2001; Raghunathan, Pham, and Corfman 2006; Park and Sela 2018), and from consumers’ prosocial behavior (Lerner, Small, and Loewenstein 2004; Cavanaugh, Bettman, and Luce 2015) to their hedonic consumption experiences (Holbrook and Hirschman 1982; Lee and Tsai 2013). This rich and expanding tapestry of research not only makes important theoretical contributions, it also carries significant substantive managerial and policy implications.Our goal in editing this special issue was to showcase cutting-edge research on the diverse effects and implications of affect—feelings, moods, and emotions—in order to deepen and enrich our understanding of various facets of consumer behavior. The rapidly evolving marketplace, characterized by a host of structural, technological, and socioeconomic changes, has brought significant transformations to how its various constituents (i.e., consumers, marketers, policy marketers) operate and interact, making it imperative to understand the crucial influence of consumer emotions. Accordingly, in this special issue, we feature research that highlights the important role of affect in the marketplace and its practical implications for consumers, marketers, and policy makers. In doing so, we hope to contribute to the essential mission of bridging theory and practice in the study of affect in consumer research (Pham 2013).Affect, Decision-Making, and Consumer Well-BeingBuilding on an extensive body of research on dual-process models, the first three articles in this special issue examine the hot-cold dichotomy in decision-making and its influence on different aspects of consumer well-being.In the opening article, Hadi and Block (2019) explore the close correspondence and intriguing substitutability between physical temperature and affective (hot) and deliberative (cold) decision-making (Metcalfe and Mischel 1999; Loewenstein and O’Donoghue 2004). The authors show that the affective mode of decision-making generates physical warmth. Adopting a thermoregulatory framework, they find that exposure to uncomfortable temperatures (that are either too cold or too warm) automatically triggers a greater reliance on feelings (vs. logic) in decision-making, so as to compensate for the non-optimal physical temperatures experienced.The hot-cold dichotomy also maps onto people’s lay beliefs about decision attributes associated with rationality (e.g., Park and Sela 2018). In three studies, Li and Hsee (2019) find that when consumers are encouraged to “be rational” in choosing between different products, they tend to rely on “cold” factors such as economic value, rather than “hot” factors such as hedonic experience. However, by doing so, consumers may end up with choices that they are less happy with. These findings underscore the reality that even though feelings often play a positive role in decision-making (Pham 2007; ; Stephen and Pham 2008; Pham, Lee, and Stephen 2012), lay beliefs about rationality and utility maximization may lead us astray and, ironically, result in less optimal decisions.The gap between hot and cold decision processes can be widened by time. An otherwise hot emotion becomes colder the further it is from the focal event that triggers the emotion (e.g., Chang and Pham 2013). Building on this time dependence of affective experiences, Chun, Park, and Thomas (2019) examine the difference between anticipated regret and experienced regret in response to unhealthy consumption. In particular, they investigate why unhealthy consumption may not trigger the same level of regret as consumers may have anticipated prior to consumption. The researchers find that “hot regret” experienced immediately following indulgent consumption activates a defensive response that attenuates the intensity of the felt regret. In contrast, the “cold regret” that consumers anticipate when thinking about future indulgent consumption does not elicit a defensive response, thereby retaining its subjective intensity. This research adds to a substantial body of work in social psychology on affect misforecasting and the workings of the so-called psychological immune system (Gilbert et al. 1998). Chun and colleagues’ findings have clear implications for the self-regulation and policy regulation of unhealthy consumption.Affect and Self-ControlAlthough a guilt-laden consumption experience (e.g., feeling guilty after indulging in unhealthy foods) may automatically set consumers’ psychological immune system into motion to make them feel better about their consumption, people can proactively engage in various measures to protect their indulgent consumption. In other words, just as consumers may employ a host of commitment devices to guard against potential temptations that interfere with their higher order self-control goals (Wertenbroch 1998), they may also strategically seek “excuses” to a priori justify their impending lack of self-control.Using a combination of field studies and lab experiments, two articles in this issue feature instances in which consumers employ such “self-indulgence precommitment devices” in the marketplace. Interestingly, these articles together suggest that even in the domain of consumption indulgence (cf. consumption self-control), consumers often demonstrate some degree of strategic sophistication.Hagen, Krishna, and McFerran (2019) document a seemingly prevalent example of precommitment to indulgence in the domain of food consumption. To reduce the guilt that consumers anticipate experiencing when eating unhealthy foods, they may prefer to be served by others rather than to serve themselves the unhealthy foods, so as to avoid having to bear the responsibility for their indulgence. Consistent with this guilt-reduction motivation, the authors find in one of their studies that consumers’ preference to be served is attenuated when they have a justification to indulge (e.g., if they have been exercising) and thus anticipate less guilt with their unhealthy consumption.Rather than looking to their social context for justifications to indulge, consumers may rely on particular attributes of market offerings to alleviate anticipated guilt. Matherly, Ghosh, and Joshi (2019) propose that while consumers are cognizant that price promotions may help to reduce feelings of guilt when purchasing indulgent products (e.g., a pleasure-oriented spa service), they may also be aware that this guilt-alleviation quality of promotions is fleeting. Therefore, consumers would rather purchase a promotional product with a more limited consumption horizon than one with a more extended (and rationally more optimal) consumption horizon. Consistent with this proposition, the authors find in their analysis of field data from a website offering large discounts that discounted products with shorter redemption windows are more popular than those with longer redemption windows. Further qualitative analyses of the products suggest that this result can be explained by the lower level of anticipated guilt associated with discount products with shorter redemption windows.Affect, Promotions, and the Pain of PayingWhile promotions may help to lessen feelings of guilt from indulgent expenditures and alleviate the pain of paying, Chang-Yuan Lee and colleagues (2019) show that different types of promotions may vary in the degree to which they help reduce the pain of paying. In particular, the results of three field experiments conducted at a grocery store show that small probabilistic price promotions (e.g., “1% chance it’s free”) resulted in greater sales than comparable fixed-price promotions (e.g., “1% off”). Additional results suggest that this is because small probabilistic discounts help reduce the pain of paying. These findings have clear managerial implications for retailers, suggesting small probabilistic discounts as a practical means of overcoming psychological impediments to consumer spending.Positive Affect and Consumer BehaviorAside from the various negative emotions (guilt, regret, pain) investigated in the aforementioned articles, positive emotions lie at the core of two other articles in this special issue. These articles examine how products with nostalgic references (Lasaleta and Loveland 2019) and the enactment of relationship rituals (Garcia-Rada, Sezer, and Norton 2019) can generate positive emotions, thereby promoting a sense of authenticity and fostering romantic love, respectively.Based on the argument that nostalgia is a past- and self-referencing emotion, Lasaleta and Loveland (2019) find that “retro-styling” (contemporary objects with design elements that reference the past) engenders feelings of nostalgia, which in turn lead to greater feelings of authenticity by bolstering a sense of self-continuity. As a result, when their perceived authenticity is threatened (e.g., when they don counterfeit products), consumers exhibit a preference for retro-styled objects as a form of compensatory consumption.Garcia-Rada, Sezer, and Norton (2019), on the other hand, propose that relationship rituals—that is, activities that couples enact repeatedly and carry symbolic meaning (e.g., making coffee for a partner every morning, going to a movie every Friday)—can increase relationship satisfaction by promoting positive feelings and reinforcing mutual commitment. These findings have obvious implication for people’s well-being. Interestingly, these authors find that the majority of relationship rituals involve some form of consumption.Incidental Affect and Consumer BehaviorWhile many of the articles in this issue center on particular integral emotions, incidental affect that consumers experience in their daily lives may also influence their behavior in seemingly unrelated domains. 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All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports the following articles citing this article:Madeline Judge, Olivia de Hoog, Goda Perlaviciute, Nadja Contzen, Linda Steg From toilet to table: value-tailored messages influence emotional responses to wastewater products, Biotechnology for Biofuels 14, no.11 (Mar 2021).https://doi.org/10.1186/s13068-021-01931-zTobias Otterbring, Alexandra Festila, Michal Folwarczny Replication and extension of framing effects to compliance with health behaviors during pandemics, Safety Science 134 (Feb 2021): 105065.https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ssci.2020.105065

User-generated content has become ubiquitous and very influential in the marketplace. Increasingly, this content is generated on smartphones rather than personal computers (PCs). This article argues that because of its physically constrained nature, smartphone (vs. PC) use leads consumers to generate briefer content, which encourages them to focus on the overall gist of their experiences. This focus on gist, in turn, tends to manifest as reviews that emphasize the emotional aspects of an experience in lieu of more specific details. Across five studies-two field studies and three controlled experiments-the authors use natural language processing tools and human assessments to analyze the linguistic characteristics of user-generated content. The findings support the thesis that smartphone use results in the creation of content that is less specific and privileges affect-especially positive affect-relative to PC-generated content. The findings also show that differences in emotional content are driven by the tendency to generate briefer content on smartphones rather than user self-selection, differences in topical content, or timing of writing. Implications for research and practice are discussed.

AbstractThis article provides a critical review of what is known about affect regulation in relation to consumption behavior. Based on numerous findings from psychology, communication research, and consumer research, we identify a core set of general principles of affect regulation in consumer behavior. First, we define affect regulation, clarify its relations to the concepts of coping and compensatory consumption, and refine the emerging concept of “displaced coping.” We then review the generic strategies used in the regulation of general negative affective states. Next, we synthesize evidence that distinct negative emotions are regulated by emotion‐specific strategies, and propose an overarching explanatory principle: the “part‐regulation principle.” We then review the main strategies used in the regulation of positive affective states. Finally, important contingencies in affect regulation are identified, including the asymmetric regulation of positive versus negative affective states, triggers of downward affect regulation, and key moderators of affect regulation.

People can be surprisingly insensitive to quantities in valuation judgments-a phenomenon called scope insensitivity, which is generally attributed to the operation of affective processes in judgment. Building on research showing that affect is inherently a decision-making system of the present, we propose that scope insensitivity is more likely to be observed in decisions that are psychologically proximate to the immediate self. Consistent with this proposition, results from seven experiments (and two replications) show that scope insensitivity is more prevalent in decisions that are temporally proximate, both prospectively (near future vs. distant future) and retrospectively (recent past vs. distant past), and in decisions that are psychologically proximate in terms of social or physical distance. In addition to clarifying the boundaries of the scope-insensitivity phenomenon, these findings help refine our understanding of the affective system of judgment. Specifically, the findings suggest that the affective system of judgment and decision making is not just a system of the present, it is more generally a system of the immediate self. Any form of distance from the immediate self (in time, social relation, or physical space) tends to attenuate the engagement of the overall affective system.

Although choosing from large assortments has often been found to be demotivating, a robust finding in the marketing literature is that consumers generally prefer larger product assortments. Standard explanations for this preference for larger assortments have focused on reason-based considerations revolving around large assortments enabling potentially “better” choices. This paper offers a different and novel, affect-based explanation. We argue that the relative preference for larger assortments is driven in part by the greater experience utility that consumers derive from reviewing such assortments. Because most products are carriers of positive affect, consumers tend to derive greater experience utility from reviewing larger assortments compared to smaller assortments. Support for this general proposition was found across four experimental studies using different strategies to document the role of affect-based experience utility in driving the preference for larger assortments. Theoretical and substantive implications are discussed.