Patti Williams

Can Mixed Emotions Peacefully Coexist

This research sheds insight on the psychological impact of mixed emotions on attitudes. In three experiments, we show that persuasion appeals that highlight conflicting emotions (e.g., both happiness and sadness) lead to less favorable attitudes for individuals with a lower propensity to accept duality (e.g., Anglo Americans, younger adults) relative to those with a higher propensity (e.g., Asian Americans, older adults). The effect appears to be due to increased levels of felt discomfort that arise for those with a lower, but not higher, propensity to accept duality when exposed to mixed emotional appeals. Theoretical implications regarding boundary conditions of emotional dissonance and distinctions between emotional and cognitive dissonance are discussed.

Non-Conscious Influences on Consumer Choice

While consumer choice research has dedicated considerable research attention to aspects of choice that are deliberative and conscious, only limited attention has been paid to aspects of choice that occur outside of conscious awareness. We review relevant research that suggests that consumer choice is a mix of conscious and nonconscious influences, and argue that the degree to which nonconscious influences affect choice is much greater than many choice researchers believe. Across a series of research domains, these influences are found to include stimulus that are not consciously perceived by the consumer, nonconscious downstream effects of a consciously perceived stimuli or thought process, and decision processes that occur entirely outside of awareness.

Age-Related Differences in Responses to Emotional Advertisements

This research investigated motivational influences associated with age on responses to emotional advertisements. Experiment 1 showed increased liking and recall of emotional ads among older consumers and that time horizon perspective moderates these age-related differences. Experiment 2 revealed influences of age and time horizon perspective on responses to different types of emotional ads. Ads focusing on avoiding negative emotions were liked and recalled more among older consumers and among young consumers made to have a limited time horizon perspective. This research illustrates the importance of considering age-related differences in information processing due to motivational as well as to cognitive changes.

When Consumers Do Not Recognize "Benign" Intention Questions as Persuasion Attempts

We demonstrate that the mere-measurement effect occurs because asking an intention question is not perceived as a persuasion attempt. In experiments 1 and 2, we show that when persuasive intent is attributed to an intention question, consumers adjust their behavior as long as they have sufficient cognitive capacity to permit conscious correction. In experiment 3 we demonstrate that this finding holds with product choice and consumption, and we find that persuasion knowledge mediates the effects. In experiment 4, we show that when respondents are educated that an intention question is a persuasive attempt, the behavioral impact of those questions is attenuated.

The question–behavior effect: What we know and where we go from here.

Researchers have consistently shown that questioning people about a future behavior influences the subsequent performance of that behavior. Since its first demonstration by Sherman (1980), two groups of researchers have built parallel streams of research investigating the self‐prophecy and mere‐measurement phenomenon. Both sets of scholars have clearly demonstrated the importance of questioning as a social influence technique and have shed light on at least two of the theoretical processes underlying observed effects. In the current paper, these researchers formally adopt a common label—the question–behavior effect—for these and similar effects. After providing a review of prior work in the area, the authors detail directions for future researchers interested in joining the investigation of this unique and persuasive form of social influence.

Simply Asking Questions About Health Behaviors Increases Both Healthy and Unhealthy Behaviors

Several recent lines of survey research demonstrate that the simple act of asking a question can lead to changes in a respondents subsequent behavior. In the current research we asked college students their likelihood to either (i) exercise or (ii) use illegal drugs in the coming 2 months. After 2 months we asked the same college students to report their exercising and illegal drug use behaviors. The findings provide further evidence that these “question–behavior” effects occur for socially normative personal health behaviors, a domain that should have high levels of respondent vigilance and defensive processing. Of more concern, we demonstrate that when a question is asked about a socially non‐normative health behavior (i.e., illegal drug use), instead of decreases in the behavior we see increased rates of the non‐normative behavior.

Feeling Like My Self: Emotion Profiles and Social Identity

Individuals possess social identities that contain unique, identity-relevant attitudes, behaviors, and beliefs providing “what-to-do” information when enacting that identity. We suggest that social identities are also associated with specific discrete emotion profiles providing “what-to-feel” information during identity enactment. We show that consumers prefer emotional stimuli consistent with their salient social identity, make product choices and emotion regulating consumption decisions to enhance (reduce) their experience of identity-consistent (inconsistent) emotions, and that experiencing identity-consistent emotions aids in the performance of identity-relevant tasks.

Emotions and Consumer Behavior

The impact of emotions on judgments, evaluations, and decisions has long been important to psychology and consumer behavior. The field’s focus has progressed from demonstrations that emotions, like cognitions, do have an impact on consumption, to more nuanced understandings of what drives the experience of discrete emotional states, how those discrete emotions uniquely affect decision making and the motivations that consumers might have to regulate their emotional states over time. The articles selected for this special collection offer further insight into these important topics. They examine how distinct perspectives shape the processes of appraisal that lead to emotional experience and how different consumers might define happiness distinctly. They examine emotions that vary by valence (positive, negative, and mixed) as well as emotions that are more hedonic versus those that rely on higher order self-conscious processes to arise. These studies also suggest new ways to distinguish among emotions and to assess their usefulness to consumers, by considering the emotion’s temporal frame. And they remind us that although arousal has received relatively little attention recently, compared to investigations focused on valence or appraisals, there are still many novel insights to be discovered by better understanding how consumers manage their experience of emotional arousal to achieve their own affective goals. Hung and Mukhopadhyay examine the influence of actor versus observer perspectives on the emotional experience. Building on the importance of cognitive appraisals in generating emotions, the authors take a step back and examine antecedent psychological processes that might differentially direct attention to certain types of situational information, influencing appraisals and the intensity with which certain emotions are felt. They find that actors tend to focus more on the situation at hand and experience more intense hedonic emotions, such as excitement or sadness when they recall or anticipate emotional experiences. On the other hand, because observer perspectives lead to greater attention to the self in the situation, observers experience more intense self-conscious emotions, such as pride, embarrassment, or guilt. While a significant amount of recent research has built understanding about how appraisals shape emotional experiences, this study opens up interesting questions about the processes that generate the appraisals that consumers might make. While Hung and Mukhopadhyay are focused on the broad distinctions between hedonic versus self-conscious emotions, the next three articles in the collection focus upon three discrete emotions that influence consumer behavior. Previous research has linked the experience of loneliness with materialism, suggesting that when consumers attach too great an importance to possessions, they may reduce the importance of their social relationships, leading to isolation and feelings of loneliness. This may, unfortunately, lead to a downward spiral of even more attachment to material objects and even more loneliness. With interesting longitudinal data, Pieters examines the interrelationships between loneliness and three subtypes of materialism: acquisition centrality (where possessions enable hedonic pleasure seeking), possession-defined success (where possessions are a status symbol), and acquisition as the pursuit of happiness (where possessions are a material means to improving happiness). This study finds a reciprocal relationship between the latter two subtypes of materialism and loneliness, but importantly, the effect of loneliness on these subtypes was greater over time than was the effect of these subtypes on loneliness. Thus, materialism may arise as a way to cope with loneliness, which suggests that to decrease materialism, one may want to first focus on building social relationships and reducing loneliness rather than focusing first upon reduced consumption. Or perhaps one might focus on using possessions as a source of fun rather than as a source

Asking questions about vices really does increase vice behavior

In a commentary in the previous issue of Social Influence, Schneider, Tahk, and Krosnick raise concerns about the analytical techniques and conclusions drawn in Williams, Block, and Fitzsimons (2006). In this response, we address a number of issues raised by their comment. We discuss their thorough reanalysis of our data, what we believe it implies, and what conclusions should be drawn. We also briefly present a number of replications of the Williams et al. experiment and discuss what the collective implications of this work are. Ultimately, we conclude that the original warning cast by Williams et al. still stands: when we ask questions about vice behaviors we should do so with great care as we may unintentionally be increasing the behavior we are asking about.

Predisposing Customers to Be More Satisfied by Inducing Empathy in Them

The present research demonstrates that increasing a consumer’s empathy with a service provider can increase that consumer’s satisfaction with the service. In Study 1, customers at a café who were induced to empathize with the clerk felt more satisfied with the service, and in Study 2, such empathizing customers were better tippers. Study 3 corroborated this finding of an empathy–satisfaction relation using dispositional empathy, showing that naturally occurring levels of empathy were positively related to consumers’ feelings of satisfaction in a long-term service relationship (personal fitness training). Study 4 found that the positive effect of empathy on consumer satisfaction held true for a negative service situation (for female but not for male consumers), indicating that the effect was not the result of consumers becoming more sensitive to the valence of the service situation. In addition, the overall results suggest that the effect was not mediated by more favorable attitudes toward the service provider or by more favorable attributions of responsibility to the service provider. Instead, we suggest that empathy may make consumers more cooperative and that being satisfied is one way consumers “cooperate” with a service provider. These findings exemplify how responses to a marketing situation can be managed by manipulating the mental state of consumers rather than by altering the attributes of the goods or services being offered.