We investigate social circles in intra-firm settings. First, we argue that social circles are inhabited by individuals whose attitudes display fit with the objectives of the social circle rather than more self-centered instrumentalism or calculation. For a test of this hypothesis, we distinguish...

Categorization is a core psychological process central to consumer and managerial decision-making. While a substantial amount of research has been conducted to examine individual categorization behaviors, relatively little is known about the group categorization process. In two experiments, we...

Categorization is a core psychological process central to consumer and managerial decision-making. While a substantial amount of research has been conducted to examine individual categorization behaviors, relatively little is known about the group categorization process. In two experiments, we...

Contrary to predictions based on cognitive accessibility, heightened gender identity salience resulted in lower perceived vulnerability and reduced donation behavior to identity-specific risks (e.g., breast cancer). No such effect was manifest with identity-neutral risks. Establishing the...

The article reviews the conceptual foundations of advertising polysemy – the occurrence of different interpretations for the same advertising message. We discuss how disciplines as diverse as psychology, semiotics and literary theory have dealt with the issue of polysemy, and provide...

We present a new event-level predictor of comparative optimism: comparative optimism is larger for more socially undesirable events. A meta-analysis shows that event social undesirability predicts comparative optimism effect sizes reported in the literature, over and above the effects of other...

Research on the role of identity in choice varies widely across fields like psychology, philosophy, consumer behavior, and economics, in both the key questions addressed and the methods of investigation. Although a large literature has established how salient aspects of identity affect attitudes...

In some product categories, low-priced brands are consistently of low quality, but high-priced brands can be anything from terrible to excellent. In other product categories, high-priced brands are consistently of high quality, but quality of low-priced brands varies widely. Three experiments...

This research contributes to the current understanding of language effects in advertising by uncovering a previously ignored mechanism shaping consumer response to an increasingly globalized marketplace. We propose a language-specific episodic trace theory of language emotionality to explain how...