Emotions can influence charity donation decisions in ways that people and policy makers might prefer they did not. For example, our studies demonstrate that people who are exposed to a sequence of emotionally described humanitarian crises, donate more resources to crises that just happen to...

How do consumers reconcile conflicting motives for social group identification and individual uniqueness? Four studies demonstrate that consumers simultaneously pursue assimilation and differentiation goals on different dimensions of a single choice: they assimilate to their group on one...

Mental accounting posits that people track their expenditures using cognitive categories or “mental accounts.” The authors propose that this cognitive process can be complemented by an approach that examines how feelings about a sum of money, or the money's “affective tag,” influence its...

Although anti-terrorism policy should be based on a normative treatment of risk that incorporates likelihoods of attack, policy makers’ anti-terror decisions may be influenced by the blame they expect from failing to prevent attacks. We show that people’s anti-terror budget priorities before...

The study of risky decision making has long used monetary gambles to study choice, but many everyday decisions do not involve the prospect of winning or losing money. Monetary gambles, as it turns out, may be processed and evaluated differently than gambles with nonmonetary outcomes. Whereas...

Humor is a common goal of marketing communications, yet humorous advertisements do not always improve consumer attitudes towards the advertised brand. By investigating a potential downside of attempting to be humorous, our inquiry helps explain why humorous ads can fail to improve, and...

Although complaints document dissatisfaction, some are also humorous. The article introduces the concept of humorous complaining and draws on the benign violation theory — which proposes that humor arises from things that seem simultaneously wrong yet okay — to examine how being humorous...

Although consumers typically expect organizations to profit from marketing goods and services, they also believe that certain organizations, like those that focus on religion and health, should prioritize communal obligations. Indeed, consumers may find it morally distressing when...

This confusion about the activities of scientists and clinicians is reflected in booksellers’ varying decisions to shelve (often on opposite ends of the bookstore) Daniel Gilbert’s Stumbling on happiness under ‘‘Science,’’ ‘‘Cognitive Science,’’ ‘‘Psychology and...