Michael A. Kamins

From Use to Abuse: When Everyday Consumption Behaviours Morph Into Addictive Consumptive Behaviours

Addiction does not begin with the harmful effects of being dependent on a particular consumption behaviour such as smoking, alcohol, or illegal drugs. Instead it starts with everyday seemingly benign behaviours that, through psychological, biophysical, and/or environmental triggers, can become harmful and morph into an addiction. We develop a framework based on harm and dependence that can help researchers better understand how consumers could become addicted to various types of everyday benign consumption behaviours (e.g., texting, shopping, plastic surgery, and other types of normally acceptable behaviours). Furthermore, the conceptual framework is based on expanding the concept of addiction to include the pre-addiction process with a focus on this continuum of benign to harmful behavioural consumption. This framework describes how consumers progress from a normal state of consumption into a state of addictive abuse and dependence. The framework discusses key issues and future research that can aid public policy researchers, practitioners, and marketers to better understand the entire pre-addiction process.

The “Temporal-Processing-Fit Effect”: The Interplay Between Regulatory State, Temporal Distance, and Construal Levels

The current research proposes a moderator of the established effect of temporal construal on the weighting of abstract features versus more concrete features - that of the individual’s regulatory focus. The moderating effect relies on the presence or absence of a fit between regulatory focus and the time horizon for upcoming decisions (i.e., prevention focus/ near future or promotion focus/ distant future). Under a promotion (prevention) focus, construal levels are higher in the near (distant) than in the distant (near) future. Four experiments find support for this temporal -processing - fit effect and provide a perspective on its possible causes, showing that when fit is the present state, the event is perceived as more important, being locally processed and construed in a concrete manner, than in non-fit states. In the latter states, the event is processed in a global manner and construed abstractly because it is perceived as less important.

Thinking or Feeling the Risk in Online Auctions: The Effects of Priming Auction Outcomes and the Dual System on Risk Perception and Amount Bid

The present research sheds new light on the antecedents and outcomes of bidders perceived risk. It examines the role of the two-system model in the context of activating the potential to either win or lose an online auction. This study demonstrates that when a bidders affective system is primed, concern about losing the item is greater and ultimately the bid amount is higher when the bidder expects to lose rather than win. Conversely, when the cognitive system is primed, the anticipated goals of winning the auction – rather than the fear of losing – drive the bidders actions. In the latter case, the bidder pays a higher amount if the expectancy of winning is primed, as opposed to the expectancy of losing. A field study on eBay and two lab studies confirm this phenomenon.

You can show them the Risk. You can tell them it’s Risky. So Why Don’t they Believe you

We have a long tradition of communicating risk to consumers through policy interventions, warnings, PSAs, and other types of strategies. There is a quest to determine the most effective way to communicate risk so that consumers will mitigate those risky behaviors by altering their consumption patterns. From a health marketing and public policy perspective, it is imperative that we understand the underlying processes that drive responses to risk information among those consumers who both consume and consider the consummation of risky products. In this session we present three studies that examine different products (tobacco and dietary supplements) and investigate the impact of different types of risk communications (PSAs, tobacco advertising, and announcements of new research findings) on consumers of these products. We consider a wide variation of consumers who may be at risk inclusive of pre-teens and college students who are at different phases of the consumption process (precontemplative, contemplative, and maintenance of usage patterns). We also use a wide variation of methodological tools (projective techniques and experiments) to test our hypotheses. Both factors contribute to the generalizability of our findings and the practical and theoretical importance of our conclusions.

An Attributional Basis for Evaluating the Concept of Free will of Young Smokers

Each year millions of young Americans aged between the ages of 18 to 24 years start smoking. Only 5% of these smokers are expected to live to the ripe old age of 50 (CDC, USA). This is largely because nicotine, one of the many chemicals present in cigarettes, produces a compulsive need to continuously use the substance. Most individuals believe that they can easily quit smoking before it produces an harm (Ho, 1988); but this is often a mirage