Rajagopal Raghunathan

The Unhealthy = Tasty Intuition and Its Effects on Taste Inferences, Enjoyment, and Choice of Food Products

Across four experiments, the authors find that when information pertaining to the assessment of the healthiness of food items is provided, the less healthy the item is portrayed to be, (1) the better is its inferred taste, (2) the more it is enjoyed during actual consumption, and (3) the greater is the preference for it in choice tasks when a hedonic goal is more (versus less) salient. The authors obtain these effects both among consumers who report that they believe that healthiness and tastiness are negatively correlated and, to a lesser degree, among those who do not report such a belief. The authors also provide evidence that the association between the concepts of “unhealthy” and “tasty” operates at an implicit level. The authors discuss possibilities for controlling the effect of the unhealthy = tasty intuition (and its potential for causing negative health consequences), including controlling the volume of unhealthy but tasty food eaten, changing unhealthy foods to make them less unhealthy but still tasty, and providing consumers with better information about what constitutes “healthy.”

Form Versus Function: How the Intensities of Specific Emotions Evoked in Functional Versus Hedonic Trade-Offs Mediate Product Preferences

This article examines the emotional and behavioral consequences of making functional versus hedonic trade-offs. Building on the proposed correspondence between functionality and a prevention focus and between hedonics and a promotion focus, the authors predict that contexts involving functional versus hedonic trade-offs evoke a variety of both negative and positive emotions, including guilt/anxiety, sadness/ disappointment, cheerfulness/excitement, and confidence/security. These predictions are confirmed. Furthermore, an analysis of the intensities of these specific emotions reveals the following additional insights: (1) Under conditions in which the options in a choice set meet or exceed both functional and hedonic cutoffs, consumers attach greater importance to the hedonic attribute, and (2) whereas the functionally superior option is preferred in choice tasks, the hedonically superior one is preferred in willingness-to-pay tasks.

Informational Properties of Anxiety and Sadness, and Displaced Coping

Replicating Raghunathan and Pham ( 1999 ), results from two experiments confirm that while anxiety triggers a preference for options that are safer and provide a sense of control, sadness triggers a preference for options that are more rewarding and comforting. Results also indicate that these effects are driven by an affect-as-information process and are most pervasive when the source of anxiety or sadness is not salient. Finally, our results document a previously unrecognized phenomenon we term displaced coping, wherein affective states whose source is salient influence decisions that are seemingly-but not directly-related to the source of these affective states. (c) 2006 by JOURNAL OF CONSUMER RESEARCH, Inc..

Walking the Hedonic Product Treadmill: Default Contrast and Mood-Based Assimilation in Judgments of Predicted Happiness with a Target Product

Consumers often browse through many products (a product context) before evaluating a particular target product. We examine the influence of four product context characteristics on happiness with a target product: pleasantness, sequence, domain match with target (i.e., whether products in the context set belong to the same category as the target), and context set size. When context and target match, pleasant and improving (compared to less pleasant and worsening) contexts induce less happiness with the target product. When there is domain mismatch, however, the results are reversed. Furthermore, the assimilation effects are significantly influenced by set size, but the contrast effects are not. While the contrast effects appear to occur by default and appear to be driven by a process of comparison, the assimilation effects appear to be driven by mood. These effects hold even when perception of domain match is manipulated via instructional framing.

Sadness as pleasure-seeking prime and anxiety as attentiveness prime: The Different Affect-Different Effect (DADE) model

According to popular interpretations of both the mood repair and affect-as-information theories, affective states of the same valence should have equivalent influences on behavior. We propose, instead, the Different Affect–Different Effect (DADE) model. Building on cognitive and psychoevolutionary theories of affect, we predict that while sadness leads to seeking pleasurable stimuli (consistent with mood repair predictions), anxiety leads to becoming more attentive (consistent with affect-as-information predictions). These predictions are tested using consumption stimuli and, across two experiments, results were consistent with our hypotheses. This research helps resolve apparent discrepancies among our findings and those found in previous mood repair and affect-as-information literatures. Specifically, we suggest that in previous demonstrations of mood repair through seeking pleasurable stimuli, the mood-state in question was most closely related to that of sadness. Likewise, we argue that in previous demonstrations of sadness leading to greater attentiveness, the procedure used to evoke sadness is also likely to have evoked anxiety.

Research Note-The Allure of Homophily in Social Media: Evidence from Investor Responses on Virtual Communities

Millions of people participate in online social media to exchange and share information. Presumably, such information exchange could improve decision making and provide instrumental benefits to the participants. However, to benefit from the information access provided by online social media, the participant will have to overcome the allure of homophily-which refers to the propensity to seek interactions with others of similar status e.g., religion, education, income, occupation or values e.g., attitudes, beliefs, and aspirations. This research assesses the extent to which social media participants exhibit homophily versus heterophily in a unique context-virtual investment communities VICs. We study the propensity of investors in seeking interactions with others with similar sentiments in VICs and identify theoretically important and meaningful conditions under which homophily is attenuated. To address this question, we used a discrete choice model to analyze 682,781 messages on Yahoo! Finance message boards for 29 Dow Jones stocks and assess how investors select a particular thread to respond. Our results revealed that, despite the benefits from heterophily, investors are not immune to the allure of homophily in interactions in VICs. The tendency to exhibit homophily is attenuated by an investors experience in VICs, the amount of information in the thread, but amplified by stock volatility. The paper discusses important implications for practice.

Information Valuation and Confirmation Bias in Virtual Communities: Evidence from Stock Message Boards

Virtual communities continue to play a greater role in social, political, and economic interactions. However, how users value information from these communities and how that affects their behavior and future expectations is not fully understood. Stock message boards provide an excellent setting to analyze these issues given the large user base and market uncertainty. Using data from 502 investor responses from a field experiment on one of the largest message board operators in South Korea, our analyses revealed that investors exhibit confirmation bias, whereby they preferentially treat messages that support their prior beliefs. This behavior is more pronounced for investors with higher perceived knowledge about the market and higher strength of belief i.e., sentiment toward a particular stock. We also find a negative interaction effect between the perceived knowledge and the strength of prior belief on confirmation bias. Those exhibiting confirmation bias are also more overconfident; as a result, they trade more actively and expect higher market returns than is warranted. Collectively, these results suggest that participation in virtual communities may not necessarily lead to superior financial returns.

The Repetition-Break Plot Structure Makes Effective Television Advertisements

The plot structure in television advertisements can enhance consumers’ brand attitudes and foster increasing consumer and industry recognition. A corpus analysis of contemporary television advertisements shows that advertisements using the repetition-break plot structure are a small percentage of television advertisements but a large percentage of Clio and Effie award–winning advertisements. They are also likely to attain postings and views on YouTube. Three experiments using television advertisements from contemporary brands show that repetition-break advertisements are persuasive, leading to more favorable brand attitudes and greater purchase intentions than similar plot structures and that this effect is attributable in part to the advertisements being more engaging. Thus, a theoretically explainable and generic plot structure yields effective advertisements. The result is a new and flexible tool for marketing professionals to use to generate advertisements, with guidelines for when and why it should and should not be effective.

Confirmation Bias, Overconfidence, and Investment Performance: Evidence from Stock Message Boards

Using data from a new field experiment in South Korea, we study how information from virtual communities such as stock message boards influences investors’ trading decisions and investment performance. Motivated by recent studies in psychology, we conjecture that investors would use message boards to seek information that confirms their prior beliefs. This confirmation bias would make them more overconfident and adversely affect their investment performance. An analysis of 502 investor responses from the largest message board operator in South Korea supports our conjecture. We find that investors exhibit confirmation bias when they process information from message boards. We also demonstrate that investors with stronger confirmation bias exhibit greater overconfidence. Those investors have higher expectations about their performance, trade more frequently, but obtain lower realized returns. Collectively, these results suggest that participation in virtual communities increases investors’ propensity to commit investment mistakes and is likely to be detrimental to their investment performance.

Eating Healthy or Feeling Empty? How the 'Healthy=Less Filling' Intuition Influences Satiety

To help understand the unconscious drivers of overeating, we examine the effect of health portrayals on people’s judgments of the fillingness of food. An implicit association test and two consumption studies provide evidence that people hold an implicit belief that healthy foods are less filling than unhealthy foods, an effect we label the “healthy = less filling” intuition. The consumption studies provide evidence that people order greater quantities of food, consume more of it, and are less full after consuming a food portrayed as more versus less healthy. In addition, we demonstrate a novel tactic for reversing consumers’ intuitions: highlighting the nourishing aspects of healthy food mitigates the belief that it is less filling. Taken together, these findings add to the burgeoning body of work on the psychological causes of weight gain and obesity and point to a way of overturning the pernicious effects of the “healthy = less filling” intuition.