Promothesh Chatterjee

Do Payment Mechanisms Change the Way Consumers Perceive Products

Do payment mechanisms change the way consumers perceive products? We argue that consumers for whom credit cards (cash) have been primed focus more on benefits (costs) when evaluating a product. In study 1, credit card (cash) primed participants made more (fewer) recall errors regarding cost attributes. In a word recognition task (study 2), participants primed with credit card (cash) identified more words related to benefits (costs) than those in the cash (credit card) condition. In study 3, participants in the credit card (cash) condition responded faster to benefits (costs) than to costs (benefits). This differential focus led credit card primed consumers to express higher reservation prices (studies 1–3) and also affected their product choices (study 4) relative to those primed with cash.

Is It Light or Dark? Recalling Moral Behavior Changes Perception of Brightness

Light and darkness have always been symbols of good and evil, respectively. In works ranging from popular movies and literature to the sacred texts of major world religions, the concepts of light and darkness have been used to convey the same messages. In the animated movie All Dogs Go to Heaven (Bluth, Goldman, & Pomeroy, 1989), heaven is depicted as a brightly lit place where the sun shines. Goodness is also associated with brightness and evil with darkness in some of Shakespeare’s plays. For example, in Macbeth, when Lady Macbeth wants to hide her evil deeds from heaven and from herself, she says, “Come, thick night/And pall thee in the dunnest smoke of hell/That my keen knife see not the wound it makes/Nor heaven peep through the blanket of the dark/To cry ‘Hold, hold!’” (Shakespeare, 1623/1884, Act 1, scene 5, lines 48–52). Comparable symbolism is used in the Bible as well. For example, Job curses the day when he was born and condemns it to darkness. The prayer of the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad—“Lead me from darkness to light!” (1.3.28)— reiterates a similar notion. Empirical findings attest to such metaphorical associations. For example, professional sports players wearing black are perceived as more malevolent than players wearing nonblack clothes (Frank & Gilovich, 1988). Research on embodied cognition suggests that such metaphors are useful not only for understanding and communicating abstract ideas, but also for forming a basis for concrete sensory experiences (Lakoff, & Johnson, 1980; Landau, Meier, & Keefer, 2010). For instance, Zhong and Leonardelli (2008) asked participants to recall a time when they felt socially rejected (an abstract concept) and then to indicate the temperature in the room (a concrete sensory experience). Compared with participants in a socially included group, participants in the socially rejected group perceived the room to be significantly colder. On the basis of these findings and theorizing, we explored whether recalling abstract concepts such as evil (as exemplified by unethical deeds) and goodness (as exemplified by ethical deeds) can indeed influence the sensory experience of the brightness of light. Specifically, we hypothesized that individuals who recall a time when they performed an ethical deed should perceive their immediate surroundings to be brighter than should individuals who recall a time when they performed an unethical deed. We tested our prediction in two studies. In addition, in Study 2, we tested a second prediction that follows from our first one: If people perceive less light after recalling an unethical behavior than after recalling an ethical behavior, participants who have recalled an unethical behavior should exhibit a greater preference for light-producing objects (but not for other objects) than should participants who have recalled an ethical behavior.

The Endowment Effect as Self-Enhancement in Response to Threat

The discrepancy between willingness to pay (WTP) and willingness to accept (WTA) for a product, referred to as the endowment effect, has been investigated and replicated across various domains because of its implications for rational decision making. The authors assume that implicit processes operate in the endowment effect and propose an explanation that is derived from the two main accounts of the effect, ownership and loss aversion. Based on the implicit egotism and self-affirmation literatures, the model argues that selling is perceived as an implicit self-threat and that sellers, as a part of their automatic defense mechanism, respond to this self-threat by enhancing the value of the self-associated object. Five studies test these conjectures and provide support for the proposed model.

Response to Pashler et al. (2016)

ABSTRACT Pashler, Rohrer, Abramson, Wolfson, and Harris (2016/this issue) in their critique of Chatterjee, Rose, and Sinha (2013) data argue that (a) large effect sizes in Study 1 and Study 2 undermine the credibility of the data; (b) in a lexical task that is part of Study 3, a concentration of participants in (5,0) and (0,5) benefit/cost word data points and the similarity of 9 neutral word responses at these points are extremely unlikely; and (c) there are apparent errors in the execution of Study 3. In this response, I examine these issues in detail. A recent review of money prime literature (Vohs, 2015) notes many effect sizes that are as big as or bigger than ours. Although 8 coding errors were discovered in Study 3 data and this particular study has been retracted from that article, as I show in this article, the arguments being put forth by the critics are untenable. For instance, my analysis shows that results hold even without the concentration of (5,0) and (0,5) participants, and I offer statistical simulations to counter critics’ arguments. Regarding the apparent errors in Study 3, I find that removing the target word stems SUPP and CE do not influence findings in any way. I also report findings from MacDonnell and White (2015), who replicate the basic finding of Chatterjee et al. in a different context.