Jeffrey S. Larson

Consumer Behavior in “Equilibrium”: How Experiencing Physical Balance Increases Compromise Choice

The authors propose that the physical sensation of balance can affect consumer judgments and decisions. A series of six experiments demonstrates that certain consumer behaviors, such as leaning back in a chair while shopping online, can activate the concept of balance and thereby affect the consumer decision-making process. Specifically, consumers experiencing a heightened sense of balance are more likely to choose compromise options. The authors propose and show evidence for the mechanism underlying these effects: that the concept of balance is metaphorically linked in the mind to the concept of parity and that activating balance increases the accessibility of the parity concept. The increased accessibility of parity changes consumer perceptions of the product offerings in a choice set, increasing the selection of compromise options because they provide parity on the described product attributes.

Adaptation and Fallibility in Experts' Judgments of Novice Performers.

Competition judges are often selected for their expertise, under the belief that a high level of performance expertise should enable accurate judgments of the competitors. Contrary to this assumption, we find evidence that expertise can reduce judgment accuracy. Adaptation level theory proposes that discriminatory capacity decreases with greater distance from one’s adaptation level. Because experts’ learning has produced an adaptation level close to ideal performance standards, they may be less able to discriminate among lower-level competitors. As a result, expertise increases judgment accuracy of high-level competitions but decreases judgment accuracy of low-level competitions. Additionally, we demonstrate that, consistent with an adaptation level theory account of expert judgment, experts systematically give more critical ratings than intermediates or novices. In summary, this work demonstrates a systematic change in human perception that occurs as task learning increases.