Claire I. Tsai

Psychological Distance and Subjective Experience: How Distancing Reduces the Feeling of Difficulty

Psychological distance can reduce the subjective experience of difficulty caused by task complexity and task anxiety. Four experiments were conducted to test several related hypotheses. Psychological distance was altered by activating a construal mind-set and by varying bodily distance from a given task. Activating an abstract mind-set reduced the feeling of difficulty. A direct manipulation of distance from the task produced the same effect: participants found the task to be less difficult when they distanced themselves from the task by leaning back in their seats. The experiments not only identify psychological distance as a hitherto unexplored but ubiquitous determinant of task difficulty but also identify bodily distance as an antecedent of psychological distance.

When Does Feeling of Fluency Matter?: How Abstract and Concrete Thinking Influence Fluency Effects

It has been widely documented that fluency (ease of information processing) increases positive evaluation. We proposed and demonstrated in three studies that this was not the case when people construed objects abstractly rather than concretely. Specifically, we found that priming people to think abstractly mitigated the effect of fluency on subsequent evaluative judgments (Studies 1 and 2). However, when feelings such as fluency were understood to be signals of value, fluency increased liking in people primed to think abstractly (Study 3). These results suggest that abstract thinking helps distinguish central decision inputs from less important incidental inputs, whereas concrete thinking does not make such a distinction. Thus, abstract thinking can augment or attenuate fluency effects, depending on whether fluency is considered important or incidental information, respectively.

Predicting Consumption Time: The Role of Event Valence and Unpacking

How much time do consumers predict they will spend on using a product or service when they have control over the usage time? We propose that their predicted consumption time is systematically influenced by the valence and the representation of the target event. In three studies, we show that consumers predict spending more time on a pleasant event when it is unpacked into several subactivities and spending less time on an unpleasant event when it is unpacked. We also investigate the underlying mechanism and demonstrate that (1) people have a lay belief that they spend more (less) time on more (less) pleasant events and (2) unpacking increases the intensity of predicted consumption experience. We further show that these changes in time predictions influence consumption decisions and address alternative explanations, including mood, mood regulation, and attention. In closing, we discuss theoretical and managerial implications.

The Effects of Duration Knowledge on Forecasted versus Actual Affective Experiences

Contrary to the lay theory that predicts duration knowledge of affective episodes to ameliorate negative experiences and weaken positive ones, we demonstrate that duration knowledge increases the extremity of affective experience. In experiments 1 and 2, participants either know the exact duration of the episodes or not and then experience either negative or positive episodes. The results show that, contrary to general intuition, duration knowledge worsens negative experiences and enhances positive experiences. In experiments 3a and 3b, we identify a boundary condition wherein the effect of duration knowledge is attenuated when participants focus primarily on the end of the experience (as opposed to the ongoing experience). In closing, we highlight the theoretical implications for studies on hedonic adaptation in general and the uncertainty effect in particular. Possible mechanisms for the effect of duration knowledge are discussed.

Moving citizens online: Using salience & message framing to motivate behavior change

Summary: To improve efficiency and reduce costs, government agencies provide more and more services online. Yet, sometimes people do not access these new services. For example, prior to our field experiment intervention, Ontario spent

From Browsing to Buying and Beyond : The Needs-Adaptive Shopper Journey Model

35 million annually on infrastructure needed for in-person license plate sticker renewals. In Canada’s most populous province, only 10% of renewals occurred online. Our intervention tested variations in messaging mailed with sticker renewal forms that encouraged consumers to renew online. We changed text and color on the envelope to try to make the benefits of the online service more salient. In addition, changes to text and color on the renewal form itself emphasized either consumer gains from online renewals or losses associated with in-person renewals. Each intervention increased use of the online service when compared to the unaltered messaging. The combination of salience and gain framing achieved the highest number of online renewals: a 41.7% relative increase.

No Pain, No Gain? How Fluency and Construal Level Affect Consumer Confidence

We propose a theory-based model of the shopper journey, incorporating the rich literature in consumer and marketing research and taking into account the evolving retailing landscape characterized by significant knowledge, lifestyle, technological, and structural changes. With consumer well-being at its core and shopper needs and motivations as the focus, our needs-adaptive shopper journey model complements and contrasts with existing models. In addition, we identify 12 shopper journey archetypes representing the paths that consumers commonly follow—archetypes that illustrate the workings and applications of our model. We discuss the nature of these archetypes, their relationships with one another, and the psychological states that consumers may experience on these shopper journeys. We also present exploratory empirical studies assessing the component states in the archetypes and mapping the archetypes onto dimensions of shopping motivations. Finally, we lay out a research agenda to help increase understanding of shopper behavior in the evolving retailing landscape.