On Appeal
Love is patient: People are more willing to wait for things they like
Annabelle Roberts, Franklin Shaddy & Ayelet Fishbach
Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, forthcoming
Abstract:
How does liking of a target affect patience? One possibility is that the more people like a target the less patient they are for it, because it is more difficult to resist the attractive smaller-sooner option to wait for the larger-later option. However, across six studies (N = 2,774), we found evidence for the opposite effect. Specifically, an increase in liking was correlated with an increase in patience (Study 1), and when people made decisions about a target they liked more, they were more willing to wait for a better quality version of it (Studies 2 and 3) and a larger amount of it (Study 4). This is because when people like a target more, they perceive a greater difference in subjective value between its smaller-sooner and larger-later versions. Thus, the perceived difference in subjective value mediated the effect of liking on patience (Study 5). Further, consistent with this proposed mechanism, we found that liking increased both willingness to wait for a better quality version of a target and willingness to pay to receive the target sooner (Study 6). These findings suggest that patience, in part, results from believing the larger-later reward is worth waiting for. These findings also offer practical recommendations for people struggling with impatience: Individuals may benefit from reminding themselves why they like what they are waiting for.
In Defense of Authenticity: How a Desire for Information Explains Preferences for Authenticity Across Domains
Yana Litovsky
Carnegie Mellon University Working Paper, October 2020
Abstract:
From restaurants to handbags to political candidates, authenticity is valued in many different contexts. Yet we lack a comprehensive way of understanding what authenticity means and why we seek it. This interdisciplinary essay, drawing on research from multiple fields such as marketing and sociology, proposes that while a unified definition of authenticity may be elusive, our motivations for seeking the authentic can be explained by a desire to learn information that reveals some valuable truth. Though the desire for authenticity is easily manipulated (often by commercial interests), I argue that it is not primarily a socially determined and superficial drive but guided by an adaptive desire for knowledge. I outline four related motives for valuing authentic entities, all connected to the search for valuable information. And I show how these motives can explain what authenticity means in the domains of art, food, culture, consumer goods, lifestyle and people.
"You" speaks to me: Effects of generic-you in creating resonance between people and ideas
Ariana Orvell, Ethan Kross & Susan Gelman
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 8 December 2020, Pages 31038-31045
Abstract:
Creating resonance between people and ideas is a central goal of communication. Historically, attempts to understand the factors that promote resonance have focused on altering the content of a message. Here we identify an additional route to evoking resonance that is embedded in the structure of language: the generic use of the word "you" (e.g., "You can't understand someone until you've walked a mile in their shoes"). Using crowd-sourced data from the Amazon Kindle application, we demonstrate that passages that people highlighted - collectively, over a quarter of a million times - were substantially more likely to contain generic-you compared to yoked passages that they did not highlight. We also demonstrate in four experiments (n = 1,900) that ideas expressed with generic-you increased resonance. These findings illustrate how a subtle shift in language establishes a powerful sense of connection between people and ideas.
"Will you?" versus "can you?": Verbal framing moderates the effect of feelings of power on consumers' reactions to waiting
Yanli Jia, Robert Wyer & Hao Shen
Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied, forthcoming
Abstract:
Having to wait for service or the delivery of a product is often unavoidable. At the same time, it is unpleasant and can decrease consumers' satisfaction with the consumption experience and their willingness to patronize the service provider in the future. How does a service provider unwittingly influence these negative reactions? We found that subtle differences in how a request to wait is phrased can have quite different effects, depending on consumers' feelings of social power. Consumers who are asked, "Will you wait?" infer that a positive response to the question would constitute a restriction on their freedom. In this case high-power consumers, who are more resistant to the restriction, are less likely to wait than their low-power counterparts. In contrast, consumers interpret "Can you wait?" as asking whether they have the ability to exercise self-control. In this case, high-power consumers, who perceive themselves to be better at self-control, are more willing to wait in order to demonstrate this control than their low-power counterparts are. Five studies provide converging evidence of these differences and the processes that underlie them. The effects generalize over different operationalizations of power and are evident in actual waiting behavior and in situations outside the laboratory.
The Endowment Effect and Beliefs About the Market
Elena Achtypi et al.
Decision, forthcoming
Abstract:
The endowment effect occurs when people assign a higher value to an item they own than to the same item when they do not own it, and this effect is often taken to reflect an ownership-induced change in the intrinsic value people assign to the object. However recent evidence shows that valuations made by buyers and sellers are influenced by market prices provided for the individual products, suggesting a role for beliefs about the markets. Here we elicit individuals' beliefs about whole distributions of market prices, enabling us to quantify whether or not a given transaction constitutes a "good deal" and to demonstrate how an endowment effect may reflect such considerations. In a meta-analysis and three laboratory experiments, we show for the first time that ownership has no effect on beliefs about either: (a) the quality of the item or (b) the appropriate market price for the item. Instead, we show that sellers demand a price for the item that matches their beliefs about the item's relative quality and the distribution of market prices in the market. Buyers, in contrast, offer less than what they believe the appropriate market price is. Thus, we argue that the endowment effect may largely reflect "adaptively rational" behavior on the part of both buyers and sellers (given their beliefs about relevant markets) rather than any ownership-induced bias or change in intrinsic preferences.
Nudging generosity in consumer elective pricing
Silvia Saccardo et al.
Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, forthcoming
Abstract:
Consumer elective pricing (CEP) - allowing each consumer to decide how much to pay for a product or service - is becoming widespread. Organizations using this pricing scheme for both commercial and non-profit purposes have adopted a wide variety of phrasings to communicate it. In this paper, we propose that seemingly negligible differences in the phrasing of CEP can increase payments and donations. In three field experiments in both charitable and commercial marketplaces, we vary the language used to describe a CEP appeal to either highlight the social aspect of the exchange or not. Our findings show that CEP phrasing that cues the social nature of the transaction elicits socially oriented considerations and nudges generosity in both non-profit and for-profit markets. Follow-up online studies shed light on consumers' perceptions under different CEP phrasing and establish a potential boundary condition.