Jeff Galak

The Effects of Traditional and Social Earned Media on Sales: A Study of a Microlending Marketplace

Marketers distinguish between three types of media: paid (e.g., advertising), owned (e.g., company website), and earned (e.g., publicity). The effects of paid media on sales have been extensively covered in the marketing literature. The effects of earned media, however, have received limited attention. This paper examines how two types of earned media, traditional (e.g., publicity and press mentions) and social (e.g., blog and online community posts), affect sales and activity in each other. Fourteen months of daily sales and media activity data from a microlending marketplace website are analyzed using a multivariate autoregressive time series model. The authors find that (i) both traditional and social earned media affect sales, (ii) the per-event sales impact of traditional earned media activity is larger than for social earned media, (iii) however, because of the greater frequency of social earned media activity, after adjusting for event frequency social earned media’s sales elasticity is significantly greater than traditional earned media’s, and (iv) social earned media appears to play an important role in driving traditional earned media activity.

Microfinance Decision Making: A Field Study of Prosocial Lending

Prosocial lending in the form of micro-financing, small uncollateralized loans to entrepreneurs in the developing world, has recently emerged as a leading contender as a cure for world poverty. Our research investigates, in a field setting with real world and consequential data, the characteristics of borrowers that engender lending. We observe that lenders favor individual borrowers over groups or consortia of borrowers, a pattern consistent with the identifiable victim effect. They also favor borrowers that are socially proximate to themselves. Across three dimensions of social distance (gender, occupation, and first name initial) lenders prefer to give to those who are more like themselves. Finally, we discuss policy implications of these findings.

Correcting the Past: Failures to Replicate Psi

Across 7 experiments (N = 3,289), we replicate the procedure of Experiments 8 and 9 from Bem (2011), which had originally demonstrated retroactive facilitation of recall. We failed to replicate that finding. We further conduct a meta-analysis of all replication attempts of these experiments and find that the average effect size (d = 0.04) is no different from 0. We discuss some reasons for differences between the results in this article and those presented in Bem (2011).

Slow Down! Insensitivity to Rate of Consumption Leads to Avoidable Satiation

Consumers often choose how quickly to consume things they enjoy. The research presented here demonstrates that they tend to consume too rapidly, growing tired of initially well-liked stimuli such as a favorite snack (experiments 1 and 4) or an enjoyable video game (experiments 2 and 3) more quickly than they would if they slowed consumption. The results also demonstrate that such overly rapid consumption results from a failure to appreciate that longer breaks between consumption episodes slow satiation. The results present a paradox: Participants who choose their own rate of consumption experience less pleasure than those who have a slower rate of consumption chosen for them.

The Subjective Sense of Feeling Satiated

The traditional view of satiation is that repeated consumption produces an unavoidable decline in liking according to the quantity and recency of consumption. We challenge this deterministic view by showing that satiation is instead partially constructed in the moment based on contextual cues. More specifically, while satiation is a function of the actual amount consumed, it also depends on the subjective sense of how much one has recently consumed. We demonstrate the influence of this subjective sense of satiation and show that it is driven by metacognitive cues such as the ease of retrieval of past experiences (Experiments 1 and 2) and can also be directly manipulated by providing a normative standard for consumption quantity (Experiment 3). Our research demonstrates that satiety is not driven solely by the amount and timing of past consumption, thereby establishing the role of higher order metacognitive inferences in satiation and providing insight into how they underlie the construction of satiation.

The Pain Was Greater If It Will Happen Again: The Effect of Anticipated Continuation on Retrospective Discomfort

Across 7 laboratory studies and 1 field study, we demonstrated that people remembered an unpleasant experience as more aversive when they expected this experience to return than when they had no such expectation. Our results indicate that this effect results from peoples tendency to brace for unpleasant experiences. Specifically, when faced with the anticipated return of the experience, people prepare for the worst, leading them to remember the initial experience as more aversive. This bracing can be reduced either by limiting peoples self-regulatory resources or by denying them the time to brace. These results indicate that peoples tendency to remember aversive experiences as less unpleasant than they actually were (as demonstrated in prior research) does not necessarily imply that people are willing to re-engage in these experiences-because the anticipation of repeating the experience may counteract the initial memory bias.

You Could Have Just Asked: Reply to Francis (2012)

In an earlier article (Galak & Meyvis, 2011), we reported eight studies that demonstrate people’s tendency to remember unpleasant experiences as more aversive when they think they will experience them again. Based on a test that, ironically, suffers from publication bias, Francis (2012) estimated that there is a high probability that we obtained at least one unsuccessful study that was left in the file drawer. He then argues that, because of this, our findings should be discounted. We propose that, instead of engaging in a statistical fishing expedition, Francis should have simply asked us for our file drawer. If he had done so, he would have quickly realized that a meta-analysis of all our studies (both published and unpublished) shows that the effect we reported is highly reliable. We suggest that when the answer is out there, it makes more sense to ask for it than to estimate it.

When Consumers’ Self-Image Motives Fail

Self-image motives and “sacrosanct beliefs” are powerful motivators of consumer judgment and decision making. The sacrosanct belief that one is rational, for instance, can cause consumers to justify seemingly unwise economic decisions. This article outlines some of the occasions when self-image motives appear to fail. For instance, although consumers occasionally pat themselves on the back for making questionable purchase decisions, at other times they find fault in perfectly reasonable ones. These and other recent findings provide an exception to the more general rule outlined by Dunning (2007).

The Effect of Inequality Frames on Support for Redistributive Tax Policies

Over the past 30 years, income inequality has increased markedly in the United States (Mishel, Bernstein, & Boushey, 2003). Despite widespread agreement that current levels of income inequality are troubling, many Americans—particularly conservatives—oppose proposals designed to reduce the magnitude of inequality (Bartels, 2005, 2008; Jost, Blount, Pfeffer, & Hunydady, 2003; Jost, Glaser, Kruglanski, & Sulloway, 2003). Regardless, it is difficult to imagine a remedy for income inequality that does not involve a transfer of wealth from the rich to the poor, like the proposed Buffett Rule, which would increase taxes on those making more than

Mate Preferences in Social Cognitive Context: When Environmental and Personal Change Leads to Predictable Cross-Cultural Variation

1 million a year. What might change conservatives’ consistent opposition to redistributive tax policies? The research we report here provides evidence that the way in which income inequality is described affects support for redistributive tax policies by influencing how individuals explain income inequality. Income inequality can be described in two ways: as the rich making more than the poor, or as the poor making less than the rich. Although the two descriptions convey identical information, previous research has suggested that the way in which inequalities are framed influences individuals’ perceptions of what other people ought to have (Lowery, Chow, & Randall-Crosby, 2009). Framing inequality as the rich making more than the poor might not only highlight how wealthy the rich are and increase individuals’ willingness to take this wealth away from them (Lowery, Chow, Knowles, & Unzueta, 2012), but also increase uncertainty about whether the wealthy are rich because of internal attributes (e.g., they may be more hardworking than poor people) or because of external advantages (e.g., they may have more inherited wealth than poor people do; Lowery & Wout, 2010). Such uncertainty should, in turn, increase willingness to take wealth away from the rich. This effect should be particularly evident among people who tend to believe that the rich deserve their wealth: conservatives (Feather, 1984). In sum, we predicted that the oft-found negative relationship between conservatism and support for redistributive tax policies would differ depending on how inequality was framed, and that these differences would be driven by differences in individuals’ explanations for poverty and wealth. Method