Consumer Psychology Review最新文献

Language plays a fundamental role in every aspect of life. But only recently has research begun to understand the role of language in consumer behavior. This paper offers an integrative discussion of research on the language of consumer psychology. We review some of the main areas of inquiry and discuss some key methodological approaches (e.g., automated textual analysis) that have been crucial to the area's development. Further, we outline some broad issues and opportunities in the space and highlight potential directions for future research. We hope to encourage more consumer psychologists to consider the great potential in producing new conceptual and substantive wisdom from words.

Research on psychological ownership is prevalent in the consumer domain. This article details the theoretical core of psychological ownership, integrating research in consumer psychology and marketing. The underlying motivations behind psychological ownership are also considered as well as the antecedents and consequences of feeling ownership. This article discusses how consumers signal and infer a sense of ownership, acknowledging that the characteristics of the target of ownership vary greatly to include physical targets as well as those that are intangible. Research is discussed on the lifecycle of ownership considering the formation, perception, and eventual dissolution of psychological ownership. The authors note various avenues for future research in psychological ownership with the aim to spur research in consumer psychology and feelings of ownership.

Although personal control is a fundamental human need, research has not yet systematically examined how it functions in consumer and marketplace settings. This article reviews and integrates the existing research on the topic to provide a greater understanding of how personal control and consumer behavior shape and inform one another. We first integrate multiple streams of research to discuss the conceptualization and antecedents of personal control. We then propose an organizing framework that identifies two ways in which feelings of low control shape consumer behavior: through motivating consumers to look for a sense of order and structure in their consumption environments and through motivating consumers to use consumption activities to reestablish feelings of control. We close by highlighting several future research directions for advancing the current understanding of how personal control and marketing relate.

In judgment and choice, consumers show a variety of biases, from the sunk cost fallacy and projection bias to usage frequency neglect and erroneous price–quality inferences. This article explains these seemingly disparate biases and predicts new biases using an overarching framework based on the relevance insensitivity theory proposed by Hsee et al. (2019). According to the theory, many biases arise because people are insufficiently sensitive to the relevance (i.e., weight) of a cue variable to the target variable (the dependent variable). The direction of the bias depends on the normative relevance of the cue—people over-rely on the cue when it is normatively irrelevant and under-rely on the cue when it is normatively highly relevant. We show that ostensibly unique and universal biases are neither unique nor universal: All are manifestations of relevance insensitivity, and each bias attenuates or reverses as the cue variable's relevance changes.

This erratum corrects the following article:

Bargh, J. A. (2022). The hidden life of the consumer mind. Consumer Psychology Review, 5(1), 3–18. https://doi.org/10.1002/arcp.1075

The original version of this article was published with typographical errors. For clarity, these errors have been corrected in the online version of the article.

American democracy is built, in part, on the ideal of a “free marketplace of ideas.” Consumers are assumed to have access to the same arguments, and through deliberation, come to a consensus about which arguments are true, and therefore, best. In this article, we explain how deceptive communication undermines this ideal. We focus on two key dimensions—the motive of deception and the perception of dishonesty—that influence people's propensity to deceive and the social rewards of doing so. Deception is seen as the most justified when it is morally motivated and when it involves indirect tactics that are not perceived as particularly dishonest. We argue, therefore, that morally motivated half-truths, rather than blatantly selfish lies, may do the greatest damage to the marketplace of ideas. Ultimately, this article advances our understanding of the causes and consequences of deception and helps to explain the dynamics that lead to widespread misinformation in our social world.

Unconscious influences permeate the everyday life of consumers. The scope of unconscious influences is greatly enhanced when the operational definition of “unconscious” shifts from the anachronistic “subliminal” one—whether the person is aware of the triggering information itself—to the far more common situation of being unaware of the influence of that stimulus. People are often unaware of how external events influence their choices and behavior, which is a good reason not to rely on self-report measures of mediating internal mental processes. What are the main forms of mundane unconscious influence? (1) The person's primary evolved needs and motives and active goal pursuits, which operate unconsciously to exert a transformative effect on selective attention, preferences, and purchases, and consumption. These can be triggered through common external means such as grocery store handouts and emails from the boss. (2) Immediate preconscious perceptual inputs from the external environment influence seemingly “free” conscious choices. Finally, (3) postconscious processes have the same effects but come from the carry-over of conscious experiences from one situation into the next. This is the domain of “nudges” or “priming effects” with many field studies as well as meta-analyses demonstrating their validity and replicability.

We consider the role of variety or diversity as a main goal for consumer experiences. We argue that consumers may incorporate variety in their choices of product or experiences for reasons other than merely increasing the consumption utility over time. Specifically, we develop a framework that shows two new roles that variety can play in consumer choice. First, it can serve as a signal to oneself and others that the consumer is able to accept change and be flexible. Second, we show that the meta role of variety, or diversity as a goal in and of itself, is beneficial because more variety in consumers' choice sets (a) provides a more optimal portfolio for future choices under uncertainty, (b) facilitates creative thinking and adoption of innovation, and (c) allows for the consumption of a fuller set of attributes, which satisfies goals of balancing and completeness.

This article focuses on understanding the meaning of consumer wealth. Research on consumer wealth uses a variety of terminology, including but not limited to economic recessions, financial constraints, financial deprivation, financial satisfaction, financial scarcity, financial well-being, income, poverty, slack, socio-economic status (SES), subjective SES, and subjective wealth. We first review and integrate multiple streams of research to provide a discussion on the conceptualization and measurement of objective wealth (i.e., consumers' actual financial resource levels) and subjective wealth (i.e., subjective assessments of consumers' financial resource levels). We then propose an organizing framework that explains the process by which consumers construct subjective wealth perceptions, identifying different routes that can be employed, as well as common cognitive and affective responses that operate across routes to shape final assessments. This framework provides greater understanding of why subjective wealth often diverges from objective wealth, why and how certain individual differences and contextual factors influence subjective wealth perceptions, and how differences across measures of consumer wealth may confer important differences that can influence downstream responses. Our framework identifies current gaps in the literature, offering new directions for future research, along with testable hypotheses related to the antecedents and consequences of subjective wealth.

Materialism has a long history in consumer research, and the volume of research continues to expand rapidly. In this article, we review extant research on materialism, with a particular focus on research in the last 10 years. We structure the review around the antecedents and consequences of materialism. We first provide a brief review of the different conceptualizations of materialism. We then discuss antecedents in terms of interpersonal influences (socialization factors—parents, peers, and media) and intrapersonal influences (psychological factors—self-esteem, power, belongingness, and self-concept clarity). Next, we discuss some consequences of materialism, such as well-being, gratitude, and prosocial attitudes and behaviors. Finally, we conclude with suggestions for future research.