Jiewen Hong

Be fit and be strong: Mastering self-regulation through regulatory fit

This research examines the effect of regulatory fit on self-regulation. People experience regulatory fit when their strategy of goal pursuit fits (vs. conflicts) with their regulatory focus. Four experiments provide support for the hypothesis that regulatory fit improves whereas regulatory nonfit impairs self-regulatory performance. These results were obtained across multiple self-regulatory tasks that included a handgrip exercise to test physical endurance (experiment 1), a choice between a healthy and a decadent snack to test willpower in the face of temptation (experiments 2 and 3), and a health-related compliance decision to demonstrate self-regulation (experiment 4). Intensified motivation seems to be the mechanism underlying the regulatory fit effect. (c) 2008 by JOURNAL OF CONSUMER RESEARCH, Inc..

Feeling Mixed but Not Torn: The Moderating Role of Construal Level in Mixed Emotions Appeals

This research examines how construal level (i.e., how abstractly or concretely people represent information in memory) affects consumers’ responses to mixed emotions appeals. The results of five studies show that, consistent with prior research, participants experienced discomfort when they encountered mixed emotions appeals and developed less favorable attitudes toward the ad relative to pure positive emotional appeals, but this was the case only for those who construed information at a concrete, low level. Participants who construed information at an abstract, high level did not experience much discomfort; hence, they found mixed emotions and pure positive emotional appeals equally persuasive. We further demonstrate that the chronic construal level associated with people’s age and cultural background underlies the moderating effects of age and culture on consumers’ attitudes toward mixed emotions appeals documented in prior research.

The effects of consumer prior knowledge and processing strategies on judgments

Four studies examine how consumers’ prior knowledge of a product category and the way they process product information affect evaluation. Consumers with extensive prior knowledge of a category evaluate the brand more favorably when the presentation of the product information prompts a sense of progress rather than facilitating a detailed assessment (Studies 1 and 2), as well as when the information presentation involves a high level of construal rather than a low level (Studies 3 and 4). Consumers with limited domain knowledge exhibit opposite outcomes. The subjective experience of processing fluency mediates these effects. The findings suggest that evaluations are more favorable when there is a fit between prior knowledge and message processing than when fit is absent.

Warm It Up with Love: The Effect of Physical Coldness on Liking of Romance Movies

Are romance movies more desirable when people are cold? Building on research on (bodily) feeling-as-information and embodied cognition, we hypothesize that physical coldness activates a need for psychological warmth, which in turn leads to an increased liking for romance movies. Four laboratory experiments and an analysis of online movie rental data provide support for our hypothesis. Specifically, studies 1A and 1B show that physical coldness increases the liking of and willingness to pay for romance movies. Study 2 shows that the effect of physical coldness on liking of romance movies only occurs for people who associate romance movies with psychological warmth. Study 3 shows that people correct for the influence of physical coldness on their liking of romance movies when physical coldness is made salient. In study 4, using data on online movie rentals and historical temperature, we found a negative relationship between weather temperature and preference for romance movies.

Perceptual Focus Effects in Choice

This article examines consumer choice as a function of the perceptual similarity of the options in the decision set. In particular, we examine a scenario in which a set of options is extended by adding alternatives that change its perceptual characteristics, increasing the salience of one of the options in the core set. In this context, we document that, contrary to normative predictions, perceptual focus can increase the choice share of one of the core options, even when the added alternatives are dominated by both options in the core set. We further show that the observed effect is a function of consumers’ mode of information processing and is more pronounced in the context of intuitive (System 1) processing than analytic (System 2) processing.

“I” Follow My Heart and “We” Rely on Reasons: The Impact of Self-Construal on Reliance on Feelings versus Reasons in Decision Making

Results from six experiments support the hypothesis that an accessible independent self-construal promotes a greater reliance on feelings in making judgments and decisions, whereas an accessible interdependent self-construal promotes a greater reliance on reasons. Specifically, compared to an interdependent self-construal, an independent self-construal increases the relative preference for affectively superior options as opposed to cognitively superior options (experiments 1A and 1B) and strengthens the effects of incidental mood on evaluations (experiment 2). Further, valuations of the decision outcome increase when independent (interdependent) consumers adopt a feeling-based (reason-based) decision strategy (experiment 3). Finally, these effects are moderated by decision focus (whether the decision is made for oneself or for others; experiment 4) and need for justification during decision making (experiment 5). Theoretical implications and managerial implications are discussed.