Rongrong Zhou

Promotion and Prevention Across Mental Accounts: When Financial Products Dictate Consumers' Investment Goals

We propose that consumers’ investment decisions involve processes of promotion and prevention regulation that are managed across separate mental accounts, with different financial products seen as representative of promotion versus prevention. Consistent with this hypothesis, we show that (a) investors are differentially sensitive to gains and losses and differentially risk seeking depending on the financial products being considered and (b) that these phenomena occur because of strong associations between financial products and promotion versus prevention. Therefore, investors’ goals may be determined by the investment opportunities under evaluation rather than being independent of these opportunities, as is assumed in standard finance theory.

Understanding impulsive eaters choice behaviors: The motivational influences of regulatory focus

This research attempts to understand the mechanism underlying the choice behavior of impulsive eaters. The authors propose a process according to which impulsive eaters (versus nonimpulsive eaters) spontaneously develop a promotion focus on exposure to hedonically tempting food, such as chocolate cake; their subsequent decision to consume the food is guided by this promotion orientation. Furthermore, the evoked promotion focus also influences subsequent choices in completely unrelated domains. A set of six experiments provides support for this mechanism and also examines its implications with regard to different ways of correcting impulsive eating behavior.

The Effect of Self‐Construal on Spatial Judgments

Much prior literature has focused on the effect of self-construal on social judgment. We highlight the role of self-construal in spatial judgments. We show that individuals with independent (vs. interdependent) self-construals are more prone to spatial judgment biases in tasks in which the context needs to be included in processing; they are less prone to spatial judgment biases in tasks in which the context needs to be excluded in processing. We show such spatial judgment effects when self-construal is operationalized by different cultures (study 1) and as a construct that shifts with situational primes (studies 2 and 3).

Motivational Influences in Time Discounting: The Effect of Regulatory Focus

In this research we examine the motivational influence of regulatory focus on revealed time preference. Drawing on regulatory focus research, we hypothesize an interaction effect between regulatory focus and valence such that, compared with prevention focus, promotion focus is associated with lower discount rate in the gain domain and a higher discount rate in the loss domain. This prediction was tested in three laboratory experiments where participants revealed their preference for intertemporal tradeoffs among hypothetical monetary rewards or payments. The data provide strong empirical support for the hypothesized interaction effect. These results highlight the importance of incorporating motivational influences in theoretical treatment of time discounting. The implications of the present research for the marketing of certain financial products that involve intertemporal tradeoffs (such as loans) are also discussed.