Suzanne B. Shu

The Effect of Mere Touch on Perceived Ownership

This research finds that merely touching an object results in an increase in perceived ownership of that object. For nonowners, or buyers, perceived ownership can be increased with either mere touch or with imagery encouraging touch. Perceived ownership can also be increased through touch for legal owners, or sellers of an object. We also explore valuation of an object and conclude that it is jointly influenced by both perceived ownership and by the valence of the touch experience. We discuss the implications of this research for online and traditional retailers as well as for touch research and endowment effect research.

Procrastination of Enjoyable Experiences

The tendency to procrastinate applies not only to aversive tasks but also to positive experiences with immediate benefits. The authors propose that models of time discounting can explain this behavior, and they test these predictions with field data and experiments. A multicity study shows that people with unlimited time windows delay visiting desirable landmarks; however, procrastination is reduced when the window of opportunity is constrained. Similarly, people procrastinate in redeeming gift certificates and gift cards with long deadlines more than those with short deadlines, resulting in overall lower redemption rates. These results run counter to participants’ predictions and typical models of impulsive behavior.

Life Expectancy as a Constructed Belief: Evidence of a Live-To or Die-By Framing Effect

Life expectations are essential inputs for many important personal decisions. We propose that longevity beliefs are responses constructed at the time of judgment, subject to irrelevant task and context factors, and leading to predictable biases. Specifically, we examine whether life expectancy is affected by the framing of expectations questions as either live-to or die-by, as well as by factors that actually affect longevity such as age, gender, and self-reported health. We find that individuals in a live-to frame report significantly higher chances of being alive at ages 55 through 95 than people in a corresponding die-by frame. Estimated mean life expectancies across three studies and 2300 respondents were 7.38 to 9.17 years longer when solicited in a live-to frame. We are additionally able to show how this framing works on a process level and how it affects preference for life annuities. Implications for models of financial decision making are discussed. Copyright Springer Science+Business Media New York 2013

Using Insights From Behavioral Economics and Social Psychology to Help Patients Manage Chronic Diseases

Despite a revolution in therapeutics, the ability to control chronic diseases remains elusive. We present here a conceptual model of the potential role of behavioral tools in chronic disease control. Clinicians implicitly accept the assumption that patients will act rationally to maximize their self-interest. However, patients may not always be the rational actors that we imagine. Major behavioral barriers to optimal health behavior include patients’ fear of threats to health, unwillingness to think about problems when risks are known or data are ambiguous, the discounting of risks that are far in the future, failure to act due to lack of motivation, insufficient confidence in the ability to overcome a health problem, and inattention due to pressures of everyday life. Financial incentives can stimulate initiation of health-promoting behaviors by reducing or eliminating financial barriers, but may not produce long-term behavior change without additional interventions. Strategies have been developed by behavioral economists and social psychologists to address each of these barriers to better decision-making. These include: labeling positive behaviors in ways consistent with patient life goals and priorities; greater focus on more immediate risks of chronic diseases; intermediate subgoals as steps to a large health goal; and implementation of specific plans as to when, where, and how an action will be taken. Such strategies hold promise for improving health behaviors and disease control, but most have not been studied in medical settings. The effectiveness of these approaches should be evaluated for their potential as tools for the clinician.

Solving Stewardship Problems with Increased Psychological Ownership

Publicly owned or shared items can often suffer from a lack of stewardship due to a diffusion of responsibility, a dilemma sometimes known as the tragedy of the commons. We propose that even when an item is publicly rather than privately owned (e.g., a local pond or community park), there can still be high levels of psychological ownership. The benefit of high psychological ownership for public goods is that the individual then takes a stronger responsibility for care (stewardship) of the object, thus reducing the tragedy of the commons. We discuss interventions designed to increase ownership for shared and public goods, including the use of social identity to drive engagement, and offer experimental evidence for such approaches.

Using aesthetics and self-affirmation to encourage openness to risky (and safe) choices.

Research has shown self-affirmation to be a powerful tool for increasing openness to arguments. However, prior examinations of its effects involved manipulations with limited applicability outside the laboratory. Building on recent work suggesting that choice of highly aesthetic products can be a form of affirmation, we proposed and tested whether merely affiliating people with high aesthetics can affirm their sense of self and thus encourage openness to arguments advocating selection of one option over another. In 3 experiments we examined this effect in financial and consumer decisions in which choices varied in their inherent risk. Across the experiments, after affiliating people with high (vs. low) aesthetics, they were more likely to select the advocated option--whether that option was the riskier or less risky option. This occurred using actual annual reports and a sample of experienced investors (Experiment 1), when the aesthetic affiliation and the choice tasks were in entirely unrelated areas (Experiment 2) and was driven by greater openness to arguments (Experiment 3). Together these studies offer a self-affirmation manipulation that is relevant and easily used by practitioners in a variety of fields. They also provide novel insights on the link between aesthetics, self-affirmation, openness, and risk taking.