Consumer Psychology Review最新文献

Health decision making has become a fundamental part of everyday consumer life. In the relatively simple course of making a meal choice, planning a trip to the gym, or forgetting to pick up a prescription, consumers’ routine choices will cumulatively define their health. In this article, we will explore the marketplace forces that shape health decisions by drawing on classic and contemporary research from marketing, psychology, and health.

This article explores three sources of motivation in goal pursuit: obtaining external rewards, obtaining internal rewards, and maintaining a positive self-concept. First, when people pursue a goal to obtain an external reward (outcome focus), their motivation increases as a function of the extent to which they value the reward and their expectancy that achieving the reward is within reach. Second, when people pursue a goal to obtain internal rewards (process focus or intrinsic motivation), the degree to which an activity is closely associated or fused with the goal increases their motivation. Third, when people pursue a goal to maintain a positive self-concept (self-signaling), their motivation is mainly a function of the extent to which they can make internal attributions for their goal-related actions and their expectations that they will remember these actions. We review empirical evidence from psychology and consumer research in support of each of these sources of motivation and discuss the theoretical and practical implications of distinguishing between these sources.

Psychological certainty has been the subject of a great deal of research across a number of different literatures. This review focuses on prior and ongoing research on attitude certainty—the subjective sense of confidence of conviction a person has about an attitude—to provide a general overview of the role of certainty in attitudes and persuasion. First, we describe the antecedents, or origins, of attitude certainty, with particular attention to the metacognitive appraisals that drive people's feelings of certainty or uncertainty about their own attitudes. Second, we review the known consequences of attitude certainty, emphasizing the role of certainty in shaping information processing, attitude strength, and attitudinal advocacy. Third, we discuss recent developments that point to an upside for uncertainty in persuasion, whereby uncertainty experienced during message processing can increase message engagement and, thus, enhance message impact. Finally, we highlight several promising directions for future research. Our hope is that this review helps organize classic and contemporary research on attitude certainty and, in so doing, sparks new interest and continuing progress in the years to come.

Insights and tools from neuroscience are of great value to marketers. Neuroscientific techniques allow consumer researchers to understand the fundamental neural underpinnings of psychological processes that drive consumer behavior, and elucidate the “black box” that is the consumer's mind. In the following review, we provide an overview of the fundamental tenets of consumer neuroscience, selectively outline key areas of marketing that consumer neuroscience has contributed to, compare and contrast neuroscientific tools and methods, and discuss future directions for neurophysiological work in marketing. In doing so, we illustrate the broad substantive landscape that neuroscience can add value to within marketing.

Marketers routinely use metaphors to compare abstract concepts to concrete concepts in remote domains. For example, a tagline “Supercharge your day” compares energy to electricity. Such messages aim to change consumer attitudes and behavior, but what impact do they have? According to Conceptual Metaphor Theory, metaphors can shape thought by borrowing knowledge of a concrete concept to understand and relate to an abstraction, despite their superficial differences. Supporting this claim is growing evidence that exposure to metaphoric messages prompts recipients to construe the metaphor's abstraction in ways that are analogous to the salient concrete concept. This article presents a selective review of this literature, focusing on studies pertaining to product evaluation and consumption attitudes. Discussion looks across findings to identify questions for future research. Taken as a whole, this research illuminates how, when, and for whom metaphoric messages are persuasive, with theoretical and practical implications for marketing, design, and persuasion.

An evolutionary theoretical approach considers the adaptive function of behavior. Here we discuss what it means to use an evolutionary approach to generate predictions about consumer behavior and the value of applying an evolutionary lens to the study of consumer psychology. We begin with a discussion of the core insights of evolutionary theory and the common misperceptions associated with an evolutionary approach to the study of behavior. We then detail how specific evolutionarily informed theories can be applied to four core areas of consumer research: risk preference, competition and luxury consumption, self-control and temporal preferences, and the consumer behavior of women and families. We also discuss the strengths and limitations of an evolutionarily informed research program.

Three recent conceptualizations have been proposed to account for the manner in which goal-directed activity in one situation can influence judgments, behavioral decisions, and overt behavior in a later situation. One, which accounts for the effect of behavioral mindsets (Wyer & Xu, 2010, Journal of Consumer Psychology, 20, 107), conceptualizes the effect of performing goal-directed behavior in a situation on the strategies selected for use in attaining quite different goals in a later, unrelated situation. A second, stimulated by Anderson's (1983, The architecture of cognition, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA) conceptualization of cognitive productions, accounts for the effects of stimuli of which one is not completely aware on motor behavior that is performed with little if any cognitive mediation. The third, suggested by Barsalou's (1999, Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 22, 577; 2008, Annual Review of Psychology, 59, 617) conceptualization of perceptual symbol systems (Barsalou, 1999), accounts for the associations of not only semantic concepts and their metaphorical meanings but also visual images, affective reactions, sensory stimulation (taste, smell, etc.), and behavioral dispositions. Recent research exemplifying effects of each of these formulations is reviewed, and an approach for conceptually integrating their implications into a more general formulation of information processing is suggested.