Consumer Psychology Review最新文献

This article offers a framework for conceptualizing culture and understanding its influence on consumer behavior. We review various theoretical formulations capturing cultural influence, ranging from macrolevel approaches relying on bipolar cultural dimensions to microlevel, cognitively oriented views. Drawing on these perspectives, we identify three “indicators of culture”—cultural content and symbols, processes and thinking styles, and value orientations—and discuss how these indicators manifest in various consumer domains and consequently guide processing and/or outcomes. We then raise methodological considerations, highlighting the imprecise, ambiguous use of priming techniques (e.g., pronoun circling) that may conflate what are presumably distinct culture-related constructs, hampering clear theoretical interpretation. Finally, we discuss how future research can increase our understanding of cultural influence by first identifying the unique contributions of each cultural indicator and then understanding how they might interact.

This conceptual paper explores the psychological consequences of consumer adoption of GenAI tools on consumer capability development. We propose a framework based on two orthogonal dimensions—Division of Cognitive Labor and Metacognitive Oversight—that yields four distinct patterns of human–AI interaction: Skilled Augmentation, Managed Automation, Unguided Effort, and Cognitive Surrender. Through synthesis of the literature on automation, cognitive offloading, and skill acquisition, we demonstrate how the shift from algorithm aversion to AI appreciation creates predictable trajectories in human capability. While some users maintain active oversight and achieve enhanced capabilities as AI-augmented polymaths, our framework predicts a natural drift toward Cognitive Surrender, where users delegate both cognitive execution and metacognitive control to AI systems. We trace how this drift, accelerated by cognitive miserliness, effort aversion, and instant gratification dynamics, can progress from rational efficiency-seeking through dependency to behavioral addiction to AI. The paper identifies theoretical mechanisms, boundary conditions, and individual differences that determine whether GenAI use leads to capability enhancement or erosion, proposing testable hypotheses for future empirical investigation.

Despite marketing's influence on beauty standards, beauty work, defined as practices performed to enhance physical appearance, is underexplored in marketing. We review existing research and introduce a conceptual framework around a central tension: Consumers are pressured to alter their bodies to meet societally enforced beauty standards, yet they are simultaneously expected to present an image aligned with their natural appearance, lest they be viewed as misrepresenting their true selves. Because physical appearance shapes inferences of internal characteristics, beauty work evokes conflicting negative moral appraisals: Too little elicits disgust or accusations of laziness, while too much signals inauthenticity or vanity. Thus, consumers are caught in a double bind. Within a narrow latitude of acceptance, consumers perform expected beauty work to meet minimum standards, while avoiding excessive beauty work that deviates too far from their innate appearance. We discuss how moderators of agency, outcome, and sociocultural factors inform future research.

Digital tools, from activity trackers and calorie-counting apps to learning platforms and AI-coaches, underlie much of consumers' goal pursuit. Yet features that inspire motivation can also undermine it. When do technologies motivate, and when do they backfire? To address this question, we integrate research on motivation and consumer technology to develop a conceptual model specifying the mechanisms through which technologies enhance or erode motivation. We organize four core functionalities (data capture, gamification, social media, and AI-powered dynamic feedback) and their motivational consequences (benefits vs. drawbacks) into the GAINS (Goal clarity and attainability, Action-Intention, Intrinsic enjoyment, New information, and Support) and DRAINs (Distraction, Reward misalignment, Action avoidance, Information overload, and Negative self-efficacy) framework. This model advances theory by bridging classic motivational principles with emerging research on technology and helps predict when and why technologies will motivate or demotivate users, opening avenues for future research and offering guidance for building technologies that truly motivate.

Much is known about the immediate effects of default choice architecture and their underlying psychological processes. Yet, significant gaps remain in understanding if, when, and how defaults produce downstream effects on consumer behavior. We resolve conceptual ambiguity around downstream default effects by developing a taxonomy to categorize them and proposing a conceptual framework that illuminates the dynamic interplay of consumers' thoughts and actions with choice architecture as they engage in decision making over time. Applying this framework, we synthesize the current state of knowledge about downstream default effects, producing insights into multiple intersecting factors that modulate them. These include the time course of choice and consumption, consumers' antecedent preferences, and the salience of trade-offs within and across choices. This theorizing guides our compilation of a research agenda for reconciling inconsistent prior findings and advancing understanding of how defaults interact with individual differences and contextual factors to influence later behavior.

Political advocacy is increasingly common. Companies routinely voice positions on political issues, consumers mobilize around issues they care about, and campaigns spend billions of dollars each election cycle. In this review, we define the construct of political advocacy, distinguish it from related constructs, and review the fast-growing interdisciplinary literature on the topic. We organize our review around a central question: when is political advocacy effective? We posit that the answer depends on two critical factors: the goal of political advocacy and the actor behind it. Drawing on decades of research across marketing, psychology, political science, management, and economics, we identify four goals that frequently underlie political advocacy: capturing attention, changing attitudes, inspiring action, and cultivating affiliation. For each goal, we review relevant findings and organize them by actor type (political campaign, company, and consumer). We conclude by discussing open questions and promising future directions for research on political advocacy.

Building on a review of pertinent literature, we draw attention to preference-expressive choice — decisions that appear to reveal a well-established individual preference — and propose that such choices can be shaped by a distinct epistemic metacognitive state: the feeling of preference (FOP). FOP is the perception that one has, or should be able to form, a preference in a given domain, even before encountering specific options and without retrievable prior preferences. Building on research in metacognition, preference fluency, and preference expression, we theorize likely antecedents and consequences of FOP and test its viability in the context of the compromise effect, where having a preference often entails “picking a side” rather than choosing the middle option. Across multiple studies, FOP — situationally triggered by preference-related cues — reduced compromising and increased preference-expressive choice, independent of preference retrieval, certainty, or social desirability. Identifying FOP as a distinct driver of choice integrates and extends existing theory on metacognition and decision-making, and highlights it as a promising, underexplored piece of the puzzle in understanding when, why, and how people feel ready to make bold and self-expressive choices.

Physicalism is the belief that everything is physical or ensues from the physical. Lay consumers resist this view, preferring instead accounts that combine the physical with the nonphysical. Inasmuch as physicalism is foundational to science and many science-based welfare-enhancing applications, departures from physicalism often result in resistance to such applications, with vital consequences. We review prior research that uses physicalism to explain consumer behavior, but we argue that even larger returns to welfare would arise from examining consumer response to physicalist characterizations of the world. To do so, we document gaps between lay beliefs and the physicalist beliefs that underlie science and technology and describe how increased lay acceptance of physicalism would result in a more just, habitable, and adaptable world.

A large portion of life as a consumer is spent mind-wandering from one off-task, spontaneous, and imaginative thought to the next. Psychology research has thoroughly documented the various characteristics of mind-wandering, showing that this default state of mind occupies much of our waking life and shapes outcomes ranging from goal pursuit and decision-making to present-moment experience. However, consumer research has largely overlooked mind-wandering as a phenomenon and mechanism that shapes consumption. In this paper, we review existing literature and propose a conceptual framework that connects mind-wandering to consumer behavior through common triggers in consumer-relevant contexts that evoke diverse mental processes and culminate in consumption outcomes. We advocate for greater study of mind-wandering within consumer behavior and for its integration as a valuable perspective with applications across a wide range of marketplace contexts.