Ioannis Evangelidis

Pressed for time? Goal conflict shapes how time is perceived, spent, and valued

Why do consumers often feel pressed for time? This research provides a novel answer to this question: consumers’ subjective perceptions of goal conflict. The authors show that beyond the number of goals competing for consumers’ time, perceived conflict between goals makes them feel that they have less time. Five experiments demonstrate that perceiving greater conflict between goals makes people feel time constrained and that stress and anxiety drive this effect. These effects, which generalize across a variety of goals and types of conflict (both related and unrelated to demands on time), influence how consumers spend time as well as how much they are willing to pay to save time. The authors identify two simple interventions that can help consumers mitigate goal conflicts negative effects: slow breathing and anxiety reappraisal. Together, the findings shed light on the factors that drive how consumers perceive, spend, and value their time.

Prominence Versus Dominance: How Relationships Between Alternatives Drive Decision Strategy and Choice

This article argues that the structure of a choice set can influence the extent to which consumers weight a given attribute. The results of seven experiments suggest that the relationship between options under consideration can influence preference ordering by shifting the decision strategy people adopt when constructing their preference. In decisions in which people afford greater importance to one attribute versus another, preference for an option that scores high on this prominent attribute may decrease when decoy options that are clearly better or worse than the focal options are inserted into the choice set. The authors posit that this effect arises because decision makers initially (and spontaneously) use dominance cues rather than prominence when evaluating options, and they continue to use this strategy even when it does not enable them to differentiate the alternatives under consideration. The authors moderate this effect by prompting respondents to consider prominence and by manipulating the order in which respondents evaluate options in the choice set. This article has theoretical implications for research on context effects, contingent decision behavior, and choice architecture as well as practical implications for product-line management.

The Number of Fatalities Drives Disaster Aid Increasing Sensitivity to People in Need

In the studies reported here, an analysis of financial donations in response to natural disasters showed that the amount of money allocated for humanitarian aid depends on the number of fatalities but not on the number of survivors who are affected by the disaster (i.e., the actual beneficiaries of the aid). On the basis of the experimental evidence, we discuss the underlying cause and provide guidelines to increase sensitivity to people in need.

Points of (Dis)parity: Expectation Disconfirmation from Common Attributes in Consumer Choice

Whereas many theories of decision making predict that presenting or not presenting common features of choice alternatives should not affect choice, in this research, the authors show that common features can be a powerful driver of choice behavior. They conjecture that consumers often hold expectations about the features that choice alternatives have in common, and they demonstrate that presenting (vs. omitting information about) a common feature increases the choice probability of the alternative that would have been expected to perform worse on the common feature, given its performance on differentiating features. This effect occurs because performance on the common feature is judged not at face value but relative to an expectation about which product should perform best on that feature. The effect holds even though performance on the common feature is clearly the same when alternatives are presented side by side. Finally, the authors demonstrate four boundary conditions of this effect.

The Asymmetric Impact of Context on Advantaged Versus Disadvantaged Options

Despite substantial prior research regarding the effect of context on choices, uncertainty remains regarding when particular context effects will be observed. In this article, the authors advance a new perspective on context-dependent choices, according to which context effects are a function of the relative advantage of one option over another and of the different strategies that decision makers evoke when making a choice. They propose that context effects resulting from the addition of a third option to a two-option set are more frequently observed when the added option is relatively similar (adjacent) to the “disadvantaged” alternative (i.e., the lower-share option) in the set. The authors conduct a series of studies to analyze the occurrence of context effects and find support for predictions related to asymmetric dominance and extremeness aversion.

I know why you voted for Trump: (Over)inferring motives based on choice

People often speculate about why others make the choices they do. This paper investigates how such inferences are formed as a function of what is chosen. Specifically, when observers encounter someone elses choice (e.g., of political candidate), they use the chosen options attribute values (e.g., a candidates specific stance on a policy issue) to infer the importance of that attribute (e.g., the policy issue) to the decision-maker. Consequently, when a chosen option has an attribute whose value is extreme (e.g., an extreme policy stance), observers infer-sometimes incorrectly-that this attribute disproportionately motivated the decision-makers choice. Seven studies demonstrate how observers use an attributes value to infer its weight-the value-weight heuristic-and identify the role of perceived diagnosticity: more extreme attribute values give observers the subjective sense that they know more about a decision-makers preferences, and in turn, increase the attributes perceived importance. The paper explores how this heuristic can produce erroneous inferences and influence broader beliefs about decision-makers.

The role of restraint omission in alcohol-related traffic fatalities

BACKGROUND AND AIMS Fatal traffic accidents affect thousands of people in the US alone every year. Alcohol consumption has been identified as a strong predictor of traffic fatalities. This result is hardly surprising as drivers who decide to consume alcohol and then drive are more likely to exhibit poor driving performance. In this paper, I argue that alcohol consumption can lead to traffic fatalities by increasing restraint omission. METHODS I analyzed individual-level data about victims (n=488,829) of fatal traffic accidents that occurred in the US between January 1, 1999 and December 31, 2015 from the Fatality Analysis Reporting System of the National Highway Traffic and Safety Administration. RESULTS There is a strong relationship between alcohol consumption and restraint use. Both vehicle drivers and occupants are far less likely to be restrained when inebriated. Additional analyses show that part of the effect of alcohol consumption on traffic fatalities can be attributed to restraint omission. CONCLUSIONS There is a significant relationship between alcohol consumption and restraint omission for both drivers and occupants of vehicles that were involved in fatal traffic accidents in the US between January 1999 and December 2015. Past public health campaigns have focused on preventing traffic fatalities by persuading drivers to refrain from getting behind the wheel after consuming alcohol. My data suggest that public health campaigns should inform both drivers and occupants of vehicles about the relationship between alcohol and restraint omission in order to minimize future casualties.