Why do affective forecasting errors persist in the face of repeated disconfirming evidence? Five studies demonstrate that people misremember their forecasts as consistent with their experience and thus fail to perceive the extent of their forecasting error. As a result, people do not learn from...

Participants are not always as diligent in reading and following instructions as experimenters would like them to be. When participants fail to follow instructions, this increases noise and decreases the validity of their data. This paper presents and validates a new tool for detecting...

It is well established that consumers' evaluations of brand extensions depend on the quality of the parent brand and the fit between that brand and the extension category. We propose that the relative importance of these two factors is influenced by two key features of a typical shopping...

Hedonic experiences that involve real, immediate events (such as reading about a recent, real-life tragic event) naturally evoke strong affective reactions. When these events are instead fictional or removed in time, they should be perceived as more psychologically distant and evoke weaker...

Given the prevalence of bounded morality and possibly tainted financial gains, this research examines how feeling guilty about money changes consumer spending. Extending the research on mental and emotional accounting, we propose that consumers also engage in “moral accounting”: consumers...

As in other social sciences, published findings in consumer research tend to overestimate the size of the effect being investigated, due to both file drawer effects and abuse of researcher degrees of freedom, including opportunistic analysis decisions. Given that most effect sizes are...

Consumers with limited discretionary money face important trade-offs when deciding how to spend it. In the current research, we suggest that feelings of financial constraint increase consumers' concern about the lasting utility of their purchases, which in turn increases their preference for...

People value experiences in part because of the memories they create. Yet, we find that people systematically overestimate how much they will retrospect about their experiences. This overestimation results from people focusing on their desire to retrospect about experiences, while failing to...

The human psyche is equipped with the capacity to solve problems using different mental states or mindsets.Different mindsets can lead to different judgment and decision making styles, each associated with its own perspective and biases. To change perspective, people can, and often do, switch...