Rashmi Adaval

Sometimes It Just Feels Right: The Differential Weighting of Affect-Consistent and Affect-Inconsistent Product Information

An affect-confirmation process is proposed to explain the conditions in which information that is similar in valence (i.e., evaluatively consistent) with a persons mood is weighted more heavily in product judgments. Specifically, the affect that participants experience as a result of a transitory mood state may appear to either confirm or disconfirm their reactions to product information, leading them to give this information more or less weight when evaluating the product as a whole. This affective confirmation typically occurs when hedonic criteria are considered more important in evaluation than utilitarian criteria. Four experiments confirmed implications of this conceptualization. Copyright 2001 by the University of Chicago.

Conscious and Nonconscious Comparisons with Price Anchors: Effects on Willingness to Pay for Related and Unrelated Products

Exposing consumers to extreme prices can influence the price they are willing to pay for both related and unrelated products. Drawing on previous theories of anchoring and adjustment and selective accessibility of judgment-relevant knowledge, the authors provide an account of both asymmetries in the impact of price anchors across product categories and contingencies in the occurrence of these asymmetries. Four studies show the deliberate consideration of price anchors that can play a key role in whether the effect of the anchors will generalize across product categories. Specifically, an explicit comparison of a product to a price anchor increases the accessibility of features that represent a product available at this price. In turn, these thoughts influence the price that consumers are willing to pay for these products. In the absence of this deliberation, however, anchors influence both related and unrelated products, provided no other cognitive activity occurs in the interim.

Imagining Yourself in the Scene: The Interactive Effects of Goal-Driven Self-Imagery and Visual Perspectives on Consumer Behavior

Consumers often imagine themselves in a scene and engage in such self-imagery while processing information. The goals that they have when they engage in such imagery (e.g., a goal to construct a story of the experience vs. a goal to acquire information) can influence how the mental images they generate affect judgments. When pictures from very different perspectives are provided, those trying to imagine themselves in the scene in order to create a story of the experience have to shift visual perspectives in order to imagine the entire experience. This shift in visual perspective can increase processing difficulty and decrease evaluations of the product or service being described. When individuals are simply imagining themselves acquiring information about the product or service, however, presenting information from different perspectives has a positive impact on evaluations. Four experiments confirmed these effects and the assumptions underlying their conceptualization.

Numerosity and Consumer Behavior

Psychologists have long been intrigued by how humans and nonhuman primates process magnitudes such as “how far, how fast, how much, how long, and how many.” This fascination perhaps stems from the fact that magnitude estimations of space, time, and number form the bedrock of most of the decisions that we make in daily life. Decisions about how many cookies to eat, how many payments to make, how many days to wait for a product, all have one thing in common: they require a fundamental ability to be able to discern discriminable elements of the type of stimulus in question. Although distinguishing one from many is an ability that is shared by humans and nonhuman primates, what makes research in this area particularly intriguing is the layer of complexity that arises when we take our ability to mathematically represent different quantities in different units (e.g., 1 month, 4 weeks, 30 days) and map it on to this more fundamental ability. The mapping of this numerical system onto a more generalized magnitude representational system allows us to raise the basic question: do magnitude estimates change when they are represented in a different unit or metric? The current collection of articles on numerosity and consumer behavior (appearing over the last two years) complements and adds to a growing body of work that has already appeared in JCR. The articles start with the assumption that a multitude of physical stimuli, regardless of the domain, can be represented in memory using a magnitude representational system. However, the overlay of a verbal, representational system that draws on our knowledge of mathematical symbols and provides a common basis for interpreting these quantities can sometimes produce effects that skew our ability to estimate things correctly. Thus, although there is no rational reason to suppose that a week might differ from 7 days, it does. The reasons for the occurrence of this numerosity effect are still unclear. Nevertheless, the effect leads to errors in estimation that affect not only how we make progress in goals that are set but also affect, at a more fundamental level, how we perceive things. The first two papers in this collection document this. The first article, by Pandelaere, Briers, and Lembregts, shows that expressing an attribute in a different unit leads to greater perceived difference if the unit is on an expanded or finer-grained scale. Thus, for example, consumers see a greater difference between products that express warranty information in months (84 months) as opposed to years (7 years). The effects are attributed to a tendency for people to focus on the numbers rather than the units in which the quantity is represented. One consequence of this tendency is that as the perceived difference increases, consumers are more likely to switch to the better quality option. The authors show the implications of this for decision making by tracking how consumers switch in a variety of domains that range from product decisions to picking a healthy snack. Interestingly, drawing attention to the possibility that this estimate can be represented in different units eliminates the effect. The second article in this series, by Bagchi and Li, examines the implications of scales that use a greater number of units in the context of loyalty programs (e.g., “earn 10 points per dollar spent and claim your reward when you reach 1,000 points” vs. “earn 1 point per dollar spent to claim a reward when you reach 100 points”). In their studies, not only does the scale representing the distance to be traveled to get the reward vary but also the step sizes to get there. At issue, then, is what consumers use in order to infer their goal progress relative to that of another person. Their findings suggest that when the step size information is ambiguous, goal progress is inferred largely from the magnitude of the scale. Consumers perceive themselves to be further away relative to someone else when the scale consists of a

Direct Mapping of Consumer Perceptions

Traditional perceptual mapping techniques such as factor analysis and multidimensional scaling do not directly involve the consumer in determining the number of dimensions, naming the dimensions or locating brands along the dimensions. This paper describes Direct Perceptual Mapping (DPM), a technique with which perceptual maps are elicited directly from the consumer. Results show that DPM compares favorably with traditional techniques in producing perceptual maps. In addition, DPM can provide process data that are not available with traditional techniques.

Does Endowing a Product with Life Make One Feel More Alive? The Effect of Product Anthropomorphism on Consumer Vitality

While most research in the area of product anthropomorphism examines how making products more humanlike can influence subsequent consumer reactions to those products, the present research examines how the act of anthropomorphizing products can influence consumers themselves. We propose that when consumers have an insufficient sense of either connectedness or competence, anthropomorphizing a product satisfies these deficiencies and increases vitality. Furthermore, this enhanced vitality has positive implications for individuals’ capacity to exert self-control in unrelated domains. A set of three studies provides support for these hypotheses. By demonstrating the positive effect of anthropomorphism on consumer vitality and self-control, this research illuminates the nature of anthropomorphism. In doing so, we also connect two streams of literature: one on anthropomorphism and the other on vitality, which share an inherent connection that has not been explicated by past research.

From Doubt to Functionality: An Imagery Story

Mental imagery and mental simulations play an important role in any consumption experience. For decades, however, the famed “imagery debate” dominated discussions on imagery and to some extent stymied research on how imagery impacts consumption. As researchers debated whether a picture-like component was part of the underlying mental representation or not, a researcher’s inability to produce concrete evidence that people had indeed formed mental images was often used to challenge imagery-based explanations. Despite this, the last decade has witnessed burgeoning research on how consumers use imagery in a myriad of ways — often in the service of some larger goal. The monograph views imagery through this functional lens and reviews and organizes these findings. This review provides a historical perspective on imagery research and then uses evidence from past research to lay down a conceptual foundation for new work that will undoubtedly emerge in the coming decades. Questions such as “What triggers imagery?” “Are there differences between perception and imagery?” “How do we use imagery to create simulations and imagine what we do not see?” “How does imagery exert an influence?” and “Are there individual and Rashmi Adaval (2018), “From Doubt to Functionality: An Imagery Story”, Foundations and Trends