Jill M. Sundie

Peacocks, Porsches, and Thorstein Veblen: Conspicuous Consumption as a Sexual Signaling System

Conspicuous consumption is a form of economic behavior in which self-presentational concerns override desires to obtain goods at bargain prices. Showy spending may be a social signal directed at potential mates. We investigated such signals by examining (a) which individuals send them, (b) which contexts trigger them, and (c) how observers interpret them. Three experiments demonstrated that conspicuous consumption is driven by men who are following a lower investment (vs. higher investment) mating strategy and is triggered specifically by short-term (vs. long-term) mating motives. A fourth experiment showed that observers interpret such signals accurately, with women perceiving men who conspicuously consume as being interested in short-term mating. Furthermore, conspicuous purchasing enhanced mens desirability as a short-term (but not as a long-term) mate. Overall, these findings suggest that flaunting status-linked goods to potential mates is not simply about displaying economic resources. Instead, conspicuous consumption appears to be part of a more precise signaling system focused on short-term mating. These findings contribute to an emerging literature on human life-history strategies.

Fear and Loving in Las Vegas: Evolution, Emotion, and Persuasion

How do arousal-inducing contexts, such as frightening or romantic television programs, influence the effectiveness of basic persuasion heuristics? Three theoretical models make different predictions: (1) A general arousal model predicts that arousal should increase the effectiveness of heuristics, (2) an affective valence model predicts that effectiveness should depend on whether the context elicits positive or negative affect, and (3) an evolutionary model predicts that persuasiveness should depend on both the specific emotion elicited and the content of the particular heuristic. Three experiments examine how fear-inducing versus romantic contexts influence the effectiveness of two widely used heuristics—social proof (e.g., “most popular”) and scarcity (e.g., “limited edition”). The results support the predictions from an evolutionary model, showing that fear can lead scarcity appeals to be counterpersuasive and that romantic desire can lead social proof appeals to be counterpersuasive. The findings highlight how an evolutionary theoretical approach can lead to novel theoretical and practical marketing insights.

Race as a Moderator of the Relationship Between Religiosity and Political Alignment

Religiosity, especially religious fundamentalism, is often assumed to have an inherent connection with conservative politics. This article proposes that the relationship varies by race in the United States. In Study 1, race moderated the relationships between religiosity indicators and political alignment in a nationally representative sample. In Study 2, the effect replicated in a student sample with more reliable measures. Among both Black and Latino Americans, the relationship between religiosity and conservative politics is far weaker than it is among White Americans, and it is sometimes altogether absent. In Study 3, a tradition-focused view of religion was found to more strongly mediate the link between religiosity and political attitudes among Whites than it did among Blacks and Latinos. It is argued that the relationship between religiosity and political alignment is best understood as a product of cultural—historical conditions associated with group memberships.

The world's (truly) oldest profession: Social influence in evolutionary perspective

Consumer psychologists have devoted a great deal of research to understanding human social influence processes. Research on social influence could be enriched by incorporating several evolutionary principles, and viewing social influence processes through an adaptationist lens. Our central argument is that different social relationships are associated with different influence goals; one wants different things from a parent, a mate, a friend, an underling, a superior, and an out-group stranger. Therefore influence tactics should vary in success depending on the nature of the relationship between the target and the agent of influence. We consider different influence goals associated with different domains of social life and examine a set of six proven principles of social influence from this evolutionary perspective. We also consider how an evolutionary approach offers some new insights into why and when these principles of social influence will be differentially effective.

The persuasive power of PowerPoint® presentations

This study investigated the persuasive impact of information using varying degrees of technological sophistication. Participants were individuals who were novices and experts in the domain of the information. Participants reviewed a presentation of a football scouts favorable report on a potential recruit. They then evaluated the recruits projected success. The experimental design was a 2 (participant football expertise: expert vs. novice) X 3 (technological sophistication of presentation: low [typed summary of statistics] vs. moderate [printed PowerPoint ® charts] vs. high [computer-based animated PowerPoint ® charts]) between subjects factorial. We expected and found that the recruit would be rated higher in the PowerPoint ® presentation condition but that experts would be less affected by the difference in communication modality than would novices. Both novice and expert participants were more swayed by the greater the technological sophistication of the presentation. This effect was more marked for football novices than football experts.

Economic Reality Versus Consumer Perceptions of Monopoly

When a Senate committee considered regulating access to a popular National Football League (NFL) broadcast in 2007, the context was familiar to marketers: accusations of abusing monopoly power. The specific issue of NFL telecasts was eventually resolved outside the public policy arena, but it raises a more general question: What “monopolies” should governments regulate? Antitrust laws in the United States arose from a desire to protect competition. However, public policy is beginning to apply them in marketplaces that are monopolies only in the sense that consumers perceive a lack of competition, even though, in actuality, competitors are free to operate. Examples range from the NFL to iPod to De Beers. The authors refer to the dominant suppliers in these markets as “psychological monopolies” created by consumer beliefs and feelings, not by economic reality. The authors argue that the regulation of such monopolies is misguided.

Don't mind the gap: a conceptual and psychometric analysis of the individual evaluation of discrepancies in the context of is user service satisfaction

When researchers are interested in capturing perceived discrepancies--for example, the perceived alignment between organizational and business-unit strategies, or the perceived gap between expected and received service delivery--many different measurement approaches are available. This paper presents a psychometric analysis of the various measures available to capture perceived discrepancies or gaps. More specifically, a set of comparative survey-based measures, drawn from published research across various disciplines, including marketing, information systems, and organizational behavior, are examined for their applicability.

Not worth the risk? Applying life history theory to understand rejection of the experiential recommendation

ABSTRACT Despite mounting support documenting the long-term benefits of consuming experiences versus material possessions, some consumers appear to reject the ‘experiential recommendation.’ Applying a life history theory perspective, we conducted seven studies to examine how unpredictability and harshness during childhood may translate into a decreased propensity to consume novel experiences in adulthood. Adults who experienced unpredictable and harsh childhood environments tended to devalue experiential options (studies 1A and 1B). A perceived lack of control over one’s life outcomes that translates into greater difficulty in evaluating experiential opportunities mediated the relationship between childhood background and devaluing experiential options (studies 3, 4A–C). Furthermore, prior or incidental experience with novel experiential options moderated the link between perceived lack of control over life outcomes and difficulty evaluating experiential purchase options (study 4B).

Dynamical Evolutionary Psychology: How Social Norms Emerge From Evolved Decision Rules.

Cultural evolutionary theory, like other evolutionary theories, links individual-level and population or society-level phenomena. It provides numerous bridges between social psychology and other disciplines and sub-disciplines. The theory uses mathematical models to understand the population-level consequences of the individual-level processes of individual and social learning. The theory has been used to explain group-level behavior such as cooperation, altruism, and the cross-cultural variation associated with social institutions. The empirical study of social psychological assumptions of such models and experimental tests of cultural-evolutionary hypotheses are in their infancy.Increasingly in recent years, social psychologists have come to appreciate the role that language plays in social life. For the discipline, the consequences of this developing awareness have been salutary. Language is critically implicated in many of the core phenomena social psychologists study (e.g., causal attribution, social identity, status and intimacy, and interpersonal relations, to list but a few), and taking the role of language into account has greatly enhanced our understanding of them. Moreover, because stimulus and response in social psychology are so often verbal in form, many fundamental questions of methodology turn on issues that are implicitly linguistic. When social psychologists have considered language, they typically have focused on the semantic–pragmatic levels of linguistic analysis. Much less attention has been paid to the system of sound production that allows semantic representations to be transformed into the perceptually accessible form we call speech. This is unfortunate for many reasons, not the least of which is that speech, in addition to its semantic content, contains information that bears directly on phenomena that are the concern of social psychological theory. It is useful to distinguish between two related areas of investigation that involve speech processing: research on speech perception and speaker perception. Speech perception research studies the process by which listeners extract linguistically significant information from highly variable acoustic input. The process is complicated by the fact that spoken language is both highly variable

How do cultural variations emerge from universal mechanisms

Diverse cultural norms governing economic behavior might emerge from a dynamic interaction of universal but flexible predispositions that get calibrated to biologically meaningful features of the local social and physical ecology. This impressive cross-cultural effort could better elucidate such gene-culture interactions by incorporating theory-driven experimental manipulations (e.g., comparing kin and non-kin exchanges), as well as analyses of mediating cognitive processes.