Participants made choices after the salience of their social identities was manipulated. Choices assimilated to the salient identity, whether that identity stemmed from a person’s role (e.g., student, family member) or culture (e.g., Chinese, American). Thus, the preferences that participants...

Attitudes differ in the functions that they serve: Whereas attitudes towards some products may serve a utilitarian purpose of helping consumers maximize rewards, attitudes towards other products may symbolize or express consumers' values. This paper shows that branding alters the associations...

This article documents a bias in people’s causal inferences, showing that people non-normatively consider an event’s consequences when inferring its causes. Across experiments, participants’ inferences about event causes were systematically affected by how similar (in both size and...

This research examines how the social context in which gifts are selected influences gift choices. Six experiments show that, when givers select gifts for multiple recipients, they tend to pass up gifts that would be better liked by one or more recipients in favor of giving different gifts to...

First experiences are highly influential. Here, the authors show that non-first experiences can be made to seem like firsts and consequently to have a disproportionate influence on judgment. In six experiments, one piece of a series of information was framed to appear to have “first” status:...

Numerous laboratory studies find that minor nuances of presentation and description change behavior in ways that are inconsistent with standard economic models. How much do these context effect matter in natural settings, when consumers make large, real decisions and have the opportunity to...

Consumers need information to compare alternatives for markets to function efficiently. Recognizing this, public policies often pair competition with easy access to comparative information. The implicit assumption is that comparison friction--the wedge between the availability of comparative...