Amy N. Dalton

The Curious Case of Behavioral Backlash: Why Brands Produce Priming Effects and Slogans Produce Reverse Priming Effects

Five experiments demonstrate that brands cause priming effects (i.e., behavioral effects consistent with those implied by the brand), whereas slogans cause reverse priming effects (i.e., behavioral effects opposite to those implied by the slogan). For instance, exposure to the retailer brand name “Walmart,” typically associated with saving money, reduces subsequent spending, whereas exposure to the Walmart slogan, “Save money. Live better,” increases it. Slogans cause reverse priming effects and brands cause priming effects because people perceive slogans, but not brands, as persuasion tactics. The reverse priming effect is driven by a nonconscious goal to correct for bias and can occur without any conscious mediation (i.e., following subliminal exposure to the word “slogan”). These findings provide evidence that consumer resistance to persuasion can be driven by processes that operate entirely outside conscious awareness.

Too Much of a Good Thing: The Benefits of Implementation Intentions Depend on the Number of Goals

Implementation intentions are specific plans regarding how, when, and where to pursue a goal (Gollwitzer). Forming implementation intentions for a single goal has been shown to facilitate goal achievement, but do such intentions benefit multiple goals? If so, people should form implementation intentions for all their goals, from eating healthily to tidying up. An investigation into this question suggests that the benefits of implemental planning for attaining a single goal do not typically extend to multiple goals. Instead, implemental planning draws attention to the difficulty of executing multiple goals, which undermines commitment to those goals relative to other desirable activities and thereby undermines goal success. Framing the execution of multiple goals as a manageable endeavor, however, reduces the perceived difficulty of multiple goal pursuit and helps consumers accomplish the various tasks they planned for. This research contributes to literature on goal management, goal specificity, the intention-behavior link, and planning.

The schema-driven chameleon: How mimicry affects executive and self-regulatory resources.

The authors propose that behavioral mimicry is guided by schemas that enable efficient social coordination. If mimicry is schema driven, then the operation of these schemas should be disrupted if partners behave in counternormative ways, such as mimicking people they generally would not or vice versa, rendering social interaction inefficient and demanding more executive and self-regulatory resources. To test this hypothesis, Experiments 1-3 used a resource-depletion paradigm in which participants performed a resource-demanding task after interacting with a confederate who mimicked them or did not mimic them. Experiment 1 demonstrated impaired task performance among participants who were not mimicked by a peer. Experiments 2 and 3 replicated this effect and also demonstrated a significant reversal in social contexts where mimicry is counternormative, suggesting that inefficiency emerges from schema inconsistency, not from the absence of mimicry per se. Experiment 4 used a divided attention paradigm and found that resources are taxed throughout schema-inconsistent interactions. These findings suggest that much-needed resources are preserved when the amount of mimicry displayed by interacting individuals adheres to norms, whereas resources are depleted when mimicry norms are violated.

Motivated Forgetting in Response to Social Identity Threat

Motivated forgetting is a psychological defense mechanism whereby people cope with threatening and unwanted memories by suppressing them from consciousness. A series of laboratory experiments investigate whether social identity threat can motivate people subsequently to forget identity-linked marketing promotions. To this effect, whereas social identity priming improves memory for identity-linked promotions, priming coupled with social identity threat (i.e., negative identity-related feedback) impairs memory. Importantly, this identity threat effect occurs only among people who identify strongly with their in-group and only for explicit memory. Implicit memory, in contrast, remains intact under threat. Additionally, the identity threat effect is eliminated (i.e., explicit memory is restored) if people affirm the threatened social identity, thereby mitigating the threat, prior to memory retrieval. Finally, the identity threat effect occurs only when automatic processes guide forgetting. When forgetting is guided by deliberate and controlled processes, the to-be-forgotten memories intrude into consciousness.