Robyn A. LeBoeuf

The Effect of Accuracy Motivation on Anchoring and Adjustment: Do People Adjust from Provided Anchors?

Increasing accuracy motivation (e.g., by providing monetary incentives for accuracy) often fails to increase adjustment away from provided anchors, a result that has led researchers to conclude that people do not effortfully adjust away from such anchors. We challenge this conclusion. First, we show that people are typically uncertain about which way to adjust from provided anchors and that this uncertainty often causes people to believe that they have initially adjusted too far away from such anchors (Studies 1a and 1b). Then, we show that although accuracy motivation fails to increase the gap between anchors and final estimates when people are uncertain about the direction of adjustment, accuracy motivation does increase anchor-estimate gaps when people are certain about the direction of adjustment, and that this is true regardless of whether the anchors are provided or self-generated (Studies 2, 3a, 3b, and 5). These results suggest that people do effortfully adjust away from provided anchors but that uncertainty about the direction of adjustment makes that adjustment harder to detect than previously assumed. This conclusion has important theoretical implications, suggesting that currently emphasized distinctions between anchor types (self-generated vs. provided) are not fundamental and that ostensibly competing theories of anchoring (selective accessibility and anchoring-and-adjustment) are complementary.

Correcting the Past: Failures to Replicate Psi

Across 7 experiments (N = 3,289), we replicate the procedure of Experiments 8 and 9 from Bem (2011), which had originally demonstrated retroactive facilitation of recall. We failed to replicate that finding. We further conduct a meta-analysis of all replication attempts of these experiments and find that the average effect size (d = 0.04) is no different from 0. We discuss some reasons for differences between the results in this article and those presented in Bem (2011).

Letting Good Opportunities Pass Us By: Examining the Role of Mind‐Set during Goal Pursuit

It is generally accepted that forming an implementation intention promotes goal pursuit and achievement. Forming an implementation intention encourages people to develop a plan, to prepare for events that allow for the execution of the plan, and to efficiently respond to these opportunities. Yet, forming an implementation intention may not be universally beneficial. An implementation intention may encourage the use of means that are part of the plan but may discourage the use of efficacious means that are not part of the plan. Four experiments show that forming an implementation intention decreases the likelihood of responding to goal-directed, out-of-plan behaviors when a person is in a concrete mind-set. Limitations, implications, and directions for future research are discussed. (c) 2010 by JOURNAL OF CONSUMER RESEARCH, Inc..

Consequence-Cause Matching: Looking to the Consequences of Events to Infer Their Causes

This article documents a bias in people’s causal inferences, showing that people nonnormatively consider an event’s consequences when inferring its causes. Across experiments, participants’ inferences about event causes were systematically affected by how similar (in both size and valence) those causes were to event consequences, even when the consequences were objectively uninformative about the causes. For example, people inferred that a product failure (computer crash) had a large cause (widespread computer virus) if it had a large consequence (job loss) but that the identical failure was more likely to have a smaller cause (cooling fan malfunction) if the consequence was small—even though the consequences gave no new information about what caused the crash. This “consequence-cause matching,” which can affect product attitudes, may arise because people are motivated to see the world as predictable and because matching is an accessible schema that helps them to fulfill this motivation.

Looming Losses in Future Time Perception

It is proposed that a future time intervals perceived length will be affected by whether the interval ends with a gain or loss. Confirming this, several experiments indicate that consumers perceive intervals ending with losses as shorter than equivalent intervals ending with gains. The authors explore the mechanisms underlying these effects, and they identify several parallels between the current effects and loss aversion. The authors further show that these changes in time perception influence consumption decisions, and they consider the implications of the findings for theories of time perception and intertemporal choice.

Branding Alters Attitude Functions and Reduces the Advantage of Function-Matching Persuasive Appeals

Attitudes differ in terms of the functions they serve: Whereas attitudes toward some products may serve a utilitarian purpose of helping consumers maximize rewards, attitudes toward other products may symbolize or express consumers’ values. This article shows that branding alters the associations between products and attitude functions. Specifically, product categories that are generally associated with utilitarian attitudes are associated with less utilitarian, more symbolic attitudes when branded, whereas product categories that are generally associated with symbolic attitudes are associated with more utilitarian, less symbolic attitudes when branded. Branding also has important implications for persuasion and for the “function-matching” advantage: Although utilitarian appeals are most persuasive for “utilitarian” products (and symbolic appeals are most persuasive for “symbolic” products) at the category level, this article shows that this pattern does not emerge at the brand level, in part because attitude functions change with branding.

Consumers Believe They Will Have More Control Over the Future than They Did Over the Past

Consumers repeatedly fail to bring about desired outcomes, and yet they also fail to learn from their own and others’ mistakes. This paper proposes a potential cause for this failure to learn: people believe that they will have more control over the future than they had over the past. Across several real-life and hypothetical scenarios, participants express the belief that, despite the uncertainty inherent in the future, future outcomes will be more under their control than were identical past outcomes. This is true in self-control contexts as well as for more general behaviors and life circumstances. The difference does not arise due to a sense of general optimism, but instead is related to the fact that people perceive it to be more important to have control over events and behaviors in the future than it was in the past.