This article promotes the development of clinical consumer psychology; the study of how dysfunctional and maladaptive cognitive and behavioral processes interact with individuals' consumer experience and behaviors. The article is organized around three primary discussion points: (a) A definition...

People often form good intentions that never reach fruition. New Year's resolutions, promises, and assurances are often quickly forgotten before they have a chance to influence behavior. Intentions are particularly ineffective when forgetting, procrastination, or distraction from other goals or...

Celebrities are figures that people like a lot but know little about. Two experiments investigated how celebrity evaluations are affected by increased knowledge. In Experiment 1, heightened knowledge of the political orientation, faith, and social attitudes of two prominent actors led to less...

Consumer judgment often is based on incomplete or limited knowledge of the relevant attributes. Three experiments were performed to investigate why these judgments are often insensitive to set size and why evaluations based on limited information tend to be stronger (more extreme and confident)...

Consumers frequently make judgments and decisions based on limited or incomplete information. Secondhand sources of product information (e.g., information from advertising, promotion, or word-of-mouth communication) typically provide information about some product properties and characteristics...

Consumers often rely heavily on price as a predictor of quality and typically overestimate the strength of this relation. Furthermore, the inferences of quality they make on the basis of price can influence their actual purchase decisions. Selective hypothesis testing appears to underlie the...

[enter Abstract Body]This research investigates the effects of the amount of information presented, information organization, and concern about closure on selective information processing and on the degree to which consumers use price as a basis for inferring quality. Consumers are found to be...