Journal of Consumer Psychology最新文献

Brands are increasingly finding themselves on the receiving end of negative labels from a variety of sources. While sometimes warranted, many of these negative labels feel like unwarranted or uncivil insults. Brands generally respond to such undeserved degradation by ignoring the insult, denying the insult, or perhaps apologizing to the insulter. This research explores another potential strategy: reappropriating the insult. We reveal that reappropriation—an intentional act of verbatim self-labeling with an externally imposed negative label—can garner unexpected benefits for brands, including greater advertisement click-through rate, interest, and more positive attitudes. The advantage of reappropriation is driven by perceptions of the brand's confidence and humor and is specific to situations in which the reappropriated insult is perceived to be unjustified and ultimately benign in nature. This work contributes to our understanding of how brands can recover from negative events and how reappropriation operates uniquely in an unexplored marketplace context. We also provide a novel recovery tactic for brand managers facing certain types of hostility.

Can displays of charity capacity cues paradoxically harm charities' fundraising efforts? Six pre-registered studies provide evidence of a charity capacity curse whereby donors penalize charities for displaying capacity cues, such as human resources capacity, organizational capacity, and financial capacity cues. This curse occurs because donors perceive higher-capacity charities as needing less help. As donors typically donate based on need, they donate less to charities with superior capacity signals. This effect is attenuated when: (1) higher-capacity charities' needs are made salient, and (2) donors reflect on how their decision impacts end-beneficiaries. This research contributes to the literature on effective altruism and charity perceptions while offering managerial insights for charities seeking to optimize their fundraising communications.

Religion plays an important role in the lives of many individuals across the world, influencing various aspects of their lives. One area where the impact of religion is observed—but underexplored—is in consumer behavior. Research on the role of religion in consumer behavior is still developing, and we propose that focusing on religious values offers a promising direction for advancing this area of research. In this paper, we review existing research on values associated with religion and their influence on a wide range of consumer behavior, using Schwartz's values theory and the moral foundations theory as frameworks. But we also seek to build on these frameworks, and we conclude by suggesting potential avenues for future research on relationships between religious values and consumer behavior.

Aglozo and Cohen (Journal of Consumer Psychology, 2025) synthesize prior work on the influence of religious values on consumer behavior through the frameworks of Schwartz's value theory and moral foundations theory. In this commentary, we extend their work by examining the intersection of religious values and branding. First, we build upon existing frameworks to identify pathways through which brands can leverage religious values (people-based associations, place-based associations, brand network associations, and activity-based associations), while also noting important downsides. Second, we discuss how context affects the extent to which consumers behave according to their religious values, focusing on three mechanisms: identity salience, value internalization and framing, and competing consumption values. Finally, we conclude with directions for future work on religious values in consumer research.

Aglozo and Cohen (2025) lay out their view of religion and values, and this commentary builds on their work by considering the religious landscape, infusing values with their religious underpinnings, and discussing the implications for consumer research (such as sustainability).

Six studies (N = 1548) and a single ad study on Facebook examine the influence of political ideology on the likelihood of accepting AI-generated recommendations in categories such as movie streaming, music streaming, and recipe websites. Contrary to conventional wisdom and prior empirical findings that conservatives are less accepting of technology, the current research finds that conservatives are more likely than liberals to accept AI-generated recommendations. This occurs because conservatives have a higher resistance to change in general, which leads them to have a greater preference for consistency in consumption contexts. Consequently, given the widely held belief that AI-generated recommendations are primarily based on one's own past preferences and behaviors, such recommendations are found to be more appealing to conservatives than liberals. However, this effect is attenuated when consumers recognize or infer that the AI lacks knowledge of their past preferences and behaviors. These findings contribute to the literature on the predictive power of political ideology for a litany of consumption-relevant behaviors while also adding nuance to our understanding of the relationship between political ideology and acceptance of new technology.

Rim, Schertz, and Berman (Journal of Consumer Psychology, 2025) present prior research examining the affective, cognitive, and social benefits of humans' interactions with nature. In doing so, they offer some specific applications to consumer psychology and encourage more research examining the consequences of nature interaction on consumer behaviors. We build on this important work by considering the breadth of potential forms of interaction between consumers and nature in both indoor and outdoor spaces as well as in real and virtual (i.e., representations of) nature exposures. We build on semantic activation and goal-systems theory to elaborate further on how nature can influence consumers. Specifically, associations elicited by nature can activate or enhance the importance of certain goals during the consumption process, thus driving consumers' judgments and decision-making. We elaborate on how nature can be specifically applied to the place, product, and promotion elements of the marketing mix and how future research can examine the consequences of nature interactions on consumer behavior.

In the primary article of this research dialogue (Journal of Consumer Psychology, 2025), we outlined the social, cognitive, and affective benefits of interacting with nature and briefly discussed the relevance of this work to consumer psychology. In their commentary to our primary article, Haws and Yamim approached nature purely within the marketplace setting and discussed how consumer exposure to natural elements may activate semantic networks that will predictably influence consumer behavior. We contextualized the current response to this commentary under the umbrella of sustainability and sustainable consumer decisions. First, we clarify attention restoration theory, stress reduction theory, and assumptions regarding the preference for nature. Second, we discuss definitions of nature from an interdisciplinary perspective. Building upon this, we speak to the potential semantic activations suggested by Haws and Yamim in response to nature exposure, probing potential individual and group-level variations and the relevance of these differences in the consumer space. Finally, we discuss potential conflicts of utilizing nature in the marketplace embedded within the perspective of sustainability goals. In this sense, we question the consequences and ethical considerations of employing nature as a mechanism to influence consumer behavior.

The surrounding environment influences how people feel, think, and behave. This effect is apparent when examining the multitude of ways interactions with natural environments impact people psychologically. In this Research Dialogue, we discuss work by ourselves and others that demonstrate the benefits of spending time in nature or interacting with natural stimuli, across three psychological domains. First, we discuss affective benefits, such as improved mood and decreased stress and rumination. Then, we discuss cognitive benefits, such as improved working memory. Lastly, we discuss social benefits, such as prosocial and proenvironmental attitudes. We introduce several environmental psychology theories that try to explain why these benefits occur. We present our own work that attempts to determine what characteristics of natural environments cause or are related to these effects by quantifying distinguishing characteristics of natural versus built environments along a variety of dimensions. We then investigate how these dimensions influence the psychological experience in a more natural versus a more built environment. We end by outlining the implications of the benefits of interacting with nature in influencing consumer behaviors.

Companies are increasingly adopting self-customization, allowing customers to create personalized products. In the food and beverage industry, this is often provided at no extra cost. While most consumers believe that adding more options maximizes the benefit in self-customization, which leads companies to adopt pay-per-add pricing models to manage costs, this logic does not always hold in food consumption. In this context, adding more can compromise health goals and diminish the taste experience. Across a field study conducted with a pizza restaurant that temporarily switched from a fixed à-la-carte menu to a self-customization menu and two controlled experiments, we demonstrate that self-customization in indulgent contexts leads to healthier choices—pizzas with fewer calories and fat calories—by enhancing a sense of autonomy. We further identify a boundary condition, where the positive effect of self-customization diminishes in healthy contexts, such as when choosing a salad.