RETAILOMANIA

What Kind of Chocolate is Best? The Last You Taste, Says a New Study

2012-02-09T07:14:00.002+01:00

Like to save the best for last? Here’s good news: If it’s the last, you’ll like it the best. That is the finding of a new study published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. “Endings affect us in lots of ways, and one is this ‘positivity effect,’” says University of Michigan psychologist Ed O’Brien, who conducted the study with colleague Phoebe C. Ellsworth. Graduation from college, the last kiss before going off to war: we experience these “lasts” with deep pleasure and affection—in fact, more than we may have felt about those places or people the day before. Even long painful experiences that end pleasantly are rated more highly than short ones ending painfully.

But does the last-is-best bias obtain in everyday life, with insignificant events? It does, the study found. Moreover, says O’Brien, it doesn’t even have to be a real last one to be experienced as best. “When you simply tell people something is the last, they may like that thing more.”

The study involved 52 students, women and men, who were told they were participating in a taste test of Hershey’s Kisses made with local ingredients. The experimenters drew five chocolates—milk, dark, crème, caramel, and almond—in random order from a hidden pocket inside a bag. The participants didn’t know how many there would be. After tasting each, they rated how enjoyable it was from 0 to 10. Some participants were told each time: “Here is the next one.” The others got the same lead-in until the fifth chocolate, before which the experimenter said, “This is the last one.” After tasting all the chocolates, the participants indicated which they liked best and how enjoyable the tasting was overall. The results: The fifth chocolate was rated as more enjoyable when it was the “last” chocolate versus just another in the taste test. The designated “last” chocolate was also the favorite 64% of the time, no matter which flavor it was. Among those who ate only “next” chocolates, the last was chosen 22% of the time—statistically speaking, a chance occurrence. And the “last” group also rated the whole experience as more enjoyable than “nexts” did.

Why is this so? The authors have a few theories. Among these: “It’s something motivational,” says O’Brien. “You think: ‘I might as well reap the benefits of this experience even though it’s going to end,’ or ‘I want to get something good out of this while I still can.’” Another, says O’Brien: “Many experiences have happy endings – from the movies and shows we watch to dessert at the end of a meal – and so people may have a general expectation that things end well, which could bleed over into these insignificant or unrelated judgments.”

The findings of what O’Brien humbly calls “our little chocolate test” could have serious implications. Professors marking the last exam may give it the best grade even if it’s not objectively better than the preceding ones. Employers may be inclined to hire the last-interviewed job applicant. Awareness of this bias could make such subjective judgments fairer.

Of course, endings don’t bring up only positive emotions, O’Brien notes. Often there’s also sadness about loss—that bittersweet feeling. If its bittersweet chocolate and the last one you think you’ll eat, however, chances are the taste will be sweet.

Deloitte Report: Global Powers of Retailing 2012

2012-02-08T15:10:00.002+01:00

Download it by clicking here.

Are you buying happiness? Research website helps you find out

2012-02-06T12:15:00.002+01:00

Psychologists have found that buying life experiences makes people happier than buying possessions, but who spends more of their spare cash on experiences? New findings published this week in the Journal of Positive Psychology reveal extraverts and people who are open to new experiences tend to spend more of their disposable income on experiences, such as concert tickets or a weekend away, rather than hitting the mall for material items.

These habitual "experiential shoppers" reaped long-term benefits from their spending: They reported greater life satisfaction, according to the study led by San Francisco State University Assistant Professor of Psychology Ryan Howell.

To further investigate how purchasing decisions impact well-being, Howell and colleagues have launched a website where members of the public can take free surveys to find out what kind of shopper they are and how their spending choices affect them. Data collected through the "Beyond the Purchase" website will be used by Howell and other social psychologists.

Graduate students in Howell's Personality and Well-being Lab will use the site to study the link between spending motivations and well-being, and how money management influences our financial and purchasing choices.

For his latest study, Howell and colleagues surveyed nearly10,000 participants, who completed online questionnaires about their shopping habits, personality traits, values and life satisfaction.

"We know that being an 'experience shopper' is linked to greater wellbeing," said Howell, whose 2009 paper on purchasing experiences, published in the Journal of Positive Psychology, challenged the adage that money can't buy happiness. "But we wanted to find out why some people gravitate toward buying experiences."

Participants' personality was measured using the "Big Five" personality traits model, a scale psychologists use to describe how extraverted, neurotic, open, conscientious and agreeable a person is. People who spent most of their disposable income on experiences scored highly on the "extravert" and "openness to new experience" scales.

"This personality profile makes sense since life experiences are inherently more social, and they also contain an element of risk," Howell said. "If you try a new experience that you don't like, you can't return it to the store for a refund."

The authors suggest that it could be easier to change your spending habits than your personality traits. "Even for people who naturally find themselves drawn to material purchases, our results suggest that getting more of a balance between traditional purchases and those that provide you with an experience could lead to greater life satisfaction and wellbeing."

Visit the Beyond the Purchase website at http://www.beyondthepurchase.org

People Lie More When Texting

2012-02-06T12:14:00.002+01:00

Sending a text message leads people to lie more often than in other forms of communication, according to new research by David Xu, assistant professor in the W. Frank Barton School of Business at Wichita State University.

Xu is lead author of the paper, which compares the level of deceit people will use in a variety of media, from text messages to face-to-face interactions.

The study will appear in the March edition of the Journal of Business Ethics. The other co-authors are professor Karl Aquino and associate professor Ronald Cenfetelli with the Sauder School of Business at the University of British Columbia.

How the study worked

The study involved 170 students from the Sauder School performing mock stock transactions in one of four ways: face-to-face, or by video, audio or text chatting.

Researchers promised cash awards of up to $50 to increase participants' involvement in the role play. "Brokers" were promised increased cash rewards for more stock sales, while "buyers" were told their cash reward would depend on the yet-to-be-determined value of the stock.

The brokers were given inside knowledge that the stock was rigged to lose half of its value. Buyers were only informed of this fact after the mock sales transaction and were asked to report whether the brokers had employed deceit to sell their stock.

The authors then analyzed which forms of communication led to more deception. They found that buyers who received information via text messages were 95 percent more likely to report deception than if they had interacted via video, 31 percent more likely to report deception when compared to face-to-face, and 18 percent more likely if the interaction was via audio chat.

The fact that people were less likely to lie via video than in person was surprising, Xu said, but makes sense given the so-called "spotlight" effect, where a person feels they're being watched more closely on video than face-to-face.

Xu said this kind of research has implications for consumers to avoid problems such as online fraud, and for businesses looking to promote trust and build a good image, Xu said.

The Little Big Book of Nexts

2012-02-05T09:03:00.000+01:00

Download it by clicking here.

New Market Realities

2012-01-28T16:50:00.000+01:00

New Marketing Realities 2012: Research by Jack Morton Worldwide

View more presentations from Jack

Own The Future of Shopper Marketing

2012-01-27T14:32:00.000+01:00

There are xtreme shoppers all over the world. Xtremes are defined by their attitudes &

behaviors & cross all demographic groups. Download the report from GfK by clicking here.

Next Generation Media

2012-01-26T10:46:00.001+01:00

Next Generation Media Quarterly January 2012

View more presentations from Dan Calladine

7 Business models that Got Shot in 2011

2012-01-24T07:49:00.002+01:00

7 Business models that Got Shot in 2011 (by @nickdemey)

View more presentations from Board of Innovation .com

Walking and Texting at the Same Time? Think Again!

2012-01-24T07:15:00.002+01:00

Talking on a cell phone or texting while walking may seem natural and easy, but it could be dangerous and result in walking errors and interfere with memory recall. Researchers at Stony Brook University found this to be the case in a study of young people walking and using their cell phones. The study is reported in the online edition of Gait & Posture.

Thirty-three men and women in their 20s, all of whom reported owning and using a cell phone and familiar with texting, participated in the study. To assess walking abilities, participants completed a baseline test. Each participant was shown a target on the floor eight meters away. Then, by obstructing vision of the target and floor, participants were instructed to walk at a comfortable pace to the target and stop. They repeated the same walk three times. After each walk, the amount of time it took and the position where each participant stopped was measured.

Participants returned one week later. With vision occluded except for the ability to see a cell phone, one-third completed the exact same task; one-third completed the task while talking on a cell phone; and one-third completed the task while texting.

“We were surprised to find that talking and texting on a cell phone were so disruptive to one’s gait and memory recall of the target location,” says Eric M. Lamberg, PT, EdD, co-author of the study and Clinical Associate Professor, Department of Physical Therapy, School of Health Technology and Management, Stony Brook University.

Dr. Lamberg summarized that the changes from the baseline blindfolded walk to testing indicated that participants who were using a cell phone to text while walking and those who used a cell phone to talk while walking were significantly slower, with 33 and 16 percent reductions in speed, respectively. Moreover, participants who were texting while walking veered off course demonstrating a 61 percent increase in lateral deviation and 13 percent increase in distance traveled.

Although walking seems automatic, areas in the brain controlling executive function and attention are necessary for walking. Dr. Lamberg says that the significant reductions in velocity and difficulty maintaining course indicates cell phone use and texting impacts working memory of these tasks.

Powerful People Feel Taller Than They Are

2012-01-24T07:14:00.000+01:00

After the huge 2010 oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, the chairman of BP referred to the victims of the spill as the “small people.” He explained it as awkward word choice by a non-native speaker of English, but the authors of a new paper published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, wondered if there was something real behind it. In their study, they found that people who feel powerful tend to overestimate their own height—they feel physically larger than they actually are.

“Maybe there’s a physical experience that goes along with being powerful,” says Jack A. Goncalo of Cornell University, who cowrote the paper with Michelle M. Duguid of Washington University. “For people who are less powerful, maybe other people and objects loom larger, and for the powerful everything else just seems smaller.” Plenty of research has shown that taller people are more likely to acquire power; taller people make more money, on average, and are more likely to be promoted. But our research is the first to show the reverse may also be true power also makes people feel taller.

In one experiment, subjects came to the lab in pairs. First they had their heights measured. Then they were given a leadership aptitude test and told that, based on their feedback, they would each be assigned to play the role of the manager or the employee. They were given fake feedback, then randomly assigned a role. After that, each person filled out a questionnaire with personal information, including eye color and height. People who had been told they would be the manager, with complete control over the work process and power to evaluate the employee, said they were taller than the actual measurement. The subject who had been told they would be the employee gave a height that was more or less the same as their real height.

Other experiments found similar results—that people who feel powerful overestimate their height. So maybe Carl-Henric Svanberg really did feel taller than the people affected by the Gulf oil spill. The results may also explain why diminutive leaders might still behave like people twice their height—they actually feel taller.

“Given that height is associated with power, raising your height may make you feel powerful,” Goncalo says—which helps explain the continuing popularity of high heels and offices on the top floor.

To “Think Outside the Box”, Think Outside the Box

2012-01-23T07:26:00.002+01:00

Want to think outside the box? Try actually thinking outside of a box. In a study to be published in an upcoming issue of Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, researchers had students think up solutions to problems while acting out various metaphors about creative thinking and found that the instructions actually worked.

The authors of the new paper were inspired by metaphors about creativity found in boardrooms to movie studios to scientific laboratories around the world and previous linkages established between mind and body. Angela Leung of Singapore Management University and her coauthors from the University of Michigan, Cornell University, and others wondered if the same was true of metaphors about creativity. “Creativity is a highly sought-after skill,” they write. “Metaphors of creative thinking abound in everyday use.” Their experiments went beyond metaphors that activate preexisting knowledge and demonstrated for the first time some metaphors “work” by activating psychological processes conducive for generating previously unknown and therefore creative ideas.

People talk about thinking “outside the box” or consider problems “on the one hand, then on the other hand.” So Leung and her colleagues created experiments where people acted out these metaphors. In one experiment, each participant was seated either inside or outside of a five-by-five-foot cardboard box. The two environments were set up to be otherwise the same in every way, and people didn’t feel claustrophobic in the box. Participants were told it was a study on different work environments. Each person completed a test widely used to test creativity; those who were outside did the test better than people who were inside the box.

In another experiment, some participants were asked to join the halves of cut-up coasters before taking a test—a physical representation of “putting two and two together.” People who acted out the metaphor displayed more convergent thinking, a component of creativity that requires bringing together many possible answers to settle on one that will work. Other experiments found that walking freely generated more original ideas than walking in a set line; another found truth in “on the hand; on the other hand.”

All this suggests that there’s something to the metaphors we use to talk about creativity. “Having a leisurely walk outdoors or freely pacing around may help us break our mindset,” says Leung. “Also, we may consider getting away from Dilbert’s cubicles and creating open office spaces to free up our minds.”

People behave socially and “well” even without rules

2012-01-19T07:24:00.000+01:00

Millions of human interactions were assessed during the study which included actions such as communication, founding and ending friendships, trading goods, sleeping, moving, however also starting hostilities, attacks and punishment. The game does not suggest any rules and everyone can live with their avatar (i.e. with their “game character” in the virtual world) as they choose. “And the result of this is not anarchy”, says Thurner. “The participants organise themselves as a social group with good intents. Almost all the actions are positive.”

“Exactly how people tick”
The interactions were fed into an “alphabet” by the researchers, “similar to how the genetic code of DNA was decoded 15 years ago”, says Thurner. “From this we get a pattern which reflects how people tick”. However, there is quite a high potential for aggression: so, for example, if a negative action is inflicted, the probability that the player will subsequently also act aggressively shoots up more than tenfold, even to about 30 percent.

Forecasting group dynamic processes in society
Thurner and his team were also able to present by means of the pattern that the whole game is a reflection of reality. “For example, we could adopt measured values one for one for communication networks. A further measurement is that almost no one has more than 150 friends, the so-called Dunbar’s number, regardless of whether in the real or the virtual world.” The study has now been published in the specialist journal “Public Library of Science One (PLoS One)”.

The long-term aim is to detect “phase transitions in societies” early on using these measurements and the behavioural patterns researched in the virtual world in order to be able to forecast group dynamic social processes and to be able to react in the event of these cases in good time. “It is possible, for example, that through certain conditions the aggression level, that has increased tenfold, remains extensively in place and therefore systemically for a longer time, which bears comparison with a drastic radicalisation in societies. Consequently, we could react to it in good time.” A current example for such a phase transition in society has been the relatively surprising “Arab Spring” with its many protests, uprisings and revolutions, which, as is well known, were targeted against the ruling totalitarian regimes in many countries.

The benefits of gossip

2012-01-18T08:01:00.000+01:00

For centuries, gossip has been dismissed as salacious, idle chatter that can damage reputations and erode trust. But a new study from the University of California, Berkeley, suggests rumor-mongering can have positive outcomes such as helping us police bad behavior, prevent exploitation and lower stress.

“Gossip gets a bad rap, but we’re finding evidence that it plays a critical role in the maintenance of social order,” said UC Berkeley social psychologist Robb Willer, a coauthor of the study published in this month’s online issue of theJournal of Personality and Social Psychology.

The study also found that gossip can be therapeutic. Volunteers’ heart rates increased when they witnessed someone behaving badly, but this increase was tempered when they were able to pass on the information to alert others.

“Spreading information about the person whom they had seen behave badly tended to make people feel better, quieting the frustration that drove their gossip,” Willer said.

So strong is the urge to warn others about unsavory characters that participants in the UC Berkeley study sacrificed money to send a “gossip note” to warn those about to play against cheaters in economic trust games. Overall, the findings indicate that people need not feel bad about revealing the vices of others, especially if it helps save someone from exploitation, the researchers said.

“We shouldn’t feel guilty for gossiping if the gossip helps prevent others from being taken advantage of,” said Matthew Feinberg, a UC Berkeley social psychologist and lead author of the paper.

The study focused on “prosocial” gossip that “has the function of warning others about untrustworthy or dishonest people,” said Willer, as opposed to the voyeuristic rumor-mongering about the ups and downs of such tabloid celebrities as Kim Kardashian and Charlie Sheen.

In a series of four experiments, researchers used games in which the players’ generosity toward each other was measured by how many dollars or points they shared. In the first experiment, 51 volunteers were hooked up to heart rate monitors as they observed the scores of two people playing the game. After a couple of rounds, the observers could see that one player was not playing by the rules and was hoarding all the points.

Observers’ heart rates increased as they witnessed the cheating, and most seized the opportunity to slip a “gossip note” to warn a new player that his or her contender was unlikely to play fair. The experience of passing on the information calmed this rise in heart rate.

“Passing on the gossip note ameliorated their negative feelings and tempered their frustration,” Willer said. “Gossiping made them feel better.”

In the second experiment, 111 participants filled out questionnaires about their level of altruism and cooperativeness. They then observed monitors showing the scores from three rounds of the economic trust game, and saw that one player was cheating.

The more prosocial observers reported feeling frustrated by the betrayal and then relieved to be given a chance to pass a gossip note to the next player to prevent exploitation.

“A central reason for engaging in gossip was to help others out – more so than just to talk trash about the selfish individual,” Feinberg said. “Also, the higher participants scored on being altruistic, the more likely they were to experience negative emotions after witnessing the selfish behavior and the more likely they were to engage in the gossip.”

To raise the stakes, participants in the third experiment were asked to go so far as to sacrifice the pay they received to be in the study if they wanted to send a gossip note. Moreover, their sacrifice would not negatively impact the selfish player’s score. Still, a large majority of observers agreed to take the financial hit just to send the gossip note.

“People paid money to gossip even when they couldn’t affect the selfish person’s outcome,” Feinberg said.

In the final study, 300 participants from around the country were recruited via Craigslist to play several rounds of the economic trust game online. They played using raffle tickets that would be entered in a drawing for a $50 cash prize –-an extra incentive to hold on to as many raffle tickets as possible.

Some players were told that the observers during a break could pass a gossip note to players in the next round to alert them to individuals not playing fairly. The threat of being the subject of negative gossip spurred virtually all the players to act more generously, especially those who had scored low on an altruism questionnaire taken prior to the game.

Together, the results from all four experiments show that “when we observe someone behave in an immoral way, we get frustrated,” Willer said. “But being able to communicate this information to others who could be helped makes us feel better.”

Social Media Lifecycle

2012-01-18T07:52:00.000+01:00

How Does 365 Days (Instead of One Year) Affect Consumer Decision Making?

2012-01-16T07:39:00.001+01:00

How long it will take to bake a cake? Twenty-eight minutes or half an hour? According to a new study in the Journal of Consumer Research, most consumers would trust the 28- minute estimate, if it comes from a reliable source.
“Consumers‟ perception of the precision and reliability of quantitative product information looms large in their decision making,” write authors Y. Charles Zhang and Norbert Schwarz (both University of Michigan). They found that consumers generally prefer more precise or “granular” information to larger units. In the case of the cake, most people perceive “28 minutes” to be more precise and therefore more reliable than “half an hour,” which sounds a bit like rounding and could presumably mean a few minutes more or less. This observation has important implications for how consumers interpret quantitative information.
“Consumers perceive products as more likely to deliver on their promises when the promise is described in fine-grained rather than coarse terms and choose accordingly,” the authors conclude. For example, “one year” and “12 months” refer to the same amount of time, but leave different impressions.
In one study, participants chose between GPS units: one was described as lasting “up to two hours” and another, which was heavier and more expensive, “up to three hours.” “When the units‟ battery life was described in hours, only 26 percent picked the „up to two hours‟ unit—they were concerned it might run out of power prematurely,” the authors write. “But when the battery was described as „up to 120 minutes,‟ more than twice as many consumers (57 percent) were happy to pick the same unit.”
The granularity effect is only effective when consumers perceive the speaker to be competent and trustworthy. If they don‟t, the speaker‟s choice of words has no influence on consumer estimates.
These findings highlight that the choice of unit needs careful consideration in product descriptions and marketing communications. “A trustworthy and cooperative communicator should be as precise as possible but not more precise than warranted,” the authors conclude.

Using Contrasting Colors to Reduce Serving Sizes and Lose Weight

2012-01-16T07:38:00.002+01:00

Choosing the right size and color of your bowls and plates could help you eat less, according to a new study in the Journal of Consumer Research.
“The bigger your dinnerware, the bigger your portion. If you use larger plates, you could end up serving 9 percent to 31 percent more than you typically would,” write authors Koert van Ittersum (Georgia Institute of Technology) and Brian Wansink (Cornell University). The average size of dinner plates has increased by almost 23 percent from since 1900, the authors point out, and eating only 50 more calories a day could result in a five-pound weight gain each year.
In one lab experiment, the researchers asked 225 student participants to pour a specified amount of tomato soup into one of seven different sized bowls: three smaller, three larger, and one control bowl. Consistent with researchers’ expectations, participants served less than the target serving size of soup into the smaller bowls, and they served more into the larger bowls.
Follow-up experiments showed that the “bowl bias” is nearly impossible to eliminate with education, awareness, or practice. During two summer camps, larger bowls led people to overserve up to 31 percent more than normal.
One of the few ways to reduce bowl bias is through color––such as changing the color of a tablecloth or a plate. In a field study, participants were asked to serve white-sauce or red-sauce pasta on either a large white or a large red plate. On average, changing the color of the plate so it was high contrast reduced how much people served by 21 percent, and changing the color of the tablecloth reduced how much people served by 10 percent.
The study reinforces the little-known Delboeuf illusion, where people believe the size of a circle is much smaller when surrounded by a large circle than a small one. Likewise, when serving onto a small plate, the serving size looks relatively larger than it actually is, which leads people to underserve.
“In the midst of hard-wired perceptual biases, a straightforward action would be to simply eliminate large dinnerware––replace our larger bowls and plates with smaller ones or contrast ones,” the authors conclude.

Why Are Wealthy Consumers Less Likely to Buy Luxuries During a Recession?

2012-01-16T07:22:00.002+01:00

During an economic downturn, even people who are not directly affected spend less on goods and services that signal social status, according to a new study in the Journal of Consumer Research.
“Even when their consumption budget is unaffected by a recession, consumers will change their expenditure patterns because some of these expenses depend on social standards that shift with economic conditions,” write authors Wagner A. Kamakura (Duke University) and Rex Yuxing Du (University of Houston).
The authors delved into a study of the “budget effect,” where consumers under pressure first reduce their expenditures on nonessentials, thus increasing the share of spending on essential goods and services. “We argue that for products/services that are visible and nonessential, consumers draw value not only from consumption per se, but also from their „positionality,‟” the authors write. Examples of “positional” goods and services are dining out, dressing up, being pampered, buying new furnishings, or flying around.
The authors analyzed U.S. household expenditure data for more than two decades, using a model that allowed them to separate budget and positionality effects. “As one would expect, we find that the share of consumption budget devoted to nonessentials (apparel, jewelry and watches, recreation, traveling) drops, while shares devoted to essentials (food at home, housing, utilities) increase during a recession due to the budget effect,” the authors write.
Wealthy consumers don‟t necessarily spend less out of empathy for those who are less well off. Instead, they perceive a reduction in others‟ expenditures on positional goods and services and feel they don‟t need to spend as much to maintain the same status relative to their peers, the authors explain.
During hard times, visible luxuries are hit twice, because people generally have less to spend and those who can consume feel less compelled to show off. “Keeping up with the Joneses is less onerous when they are not keeping up,” the authors conclude.

If Donuts Could Talk They’d Tell You to Take the Elevator Instead of the Stairs

2012-01-16T07:19:00.002+01:00

Humanizing a brand can influence consumer behavior in a healthy or unhealthy direction—depending on how they envision the brand, according to a new study in the Journal of Consumer Research.
“This research suggests that people’s behavior will be influenced by the brands they have been asked to think about,” write authors Pankaj Aggarwal (University of Toronto) and Ann L. McGill (University of Chicago).
The authors conducted three laboratory studies where they asked half of the participants to imagine well-known brands as coming to life as a person (anthropomorphizing). Other participants were not instructed to think about brands in human terms. Anthropomorphizing participants considered some brands to be partners (working along with the consumers to achieve benefits) and others to be servants (the brand did work on behalf of the consumer).
After thinking about Kellogg’s or Krispy Kreme, participants were asked to do a second study where they were asked about day-to-day judgments. They were asked if they would take the stairs (healthy behavior) or the elevator (less healthy behavior) in their building. “Those who had earlier been thinking about a humanized Kellogg were more likely to take the stairs, consistent with the Kellogg’s image, but those thinking about Krispy Kreme were more likely to take the elevator, consistent with the Krispy Kreme image, provided they liked the brand,” the authors write.
For a “servant brand” (like Volvo, known for safety), people behaved in opposite ways from the brand’s image. “People who thought about the humanized Volvo took on more risk [in gambling], accepting less and less advantageous gambles, behavior that is the opposite of the brand reputation.”
“Whether or not people’s behavior was affected by the brand depended on how they had been asked to envision the brand, specifically, as coming to life as a person or not,” the authors write. “Then whether they acted like the brand’s image or the opposite depended on whether the brand seemed to play a role more like a partner in their lives or a servant to them, and whether they liked it or not.”

How Does Messiness Affect Consumer Preference for Simplicity?

2012-01-16T07:18:00.002+01:00

A clean desk might not be all it‟s cracked up to be. According to a new study in the Journal of Consumer Research, messiness can lead consumers toward clearer thinking— especially political conservatives.
“Business and government managers often promote „clean desk‟ policies to avoid disorganized offices and messy desks, for the purpose of boosting work efficiency and productivity,” write authors Jia (Elke) Liu (University of Groningen), Dirk Smeesters (Erasmus University), and Debra Trampe (University of Groningen). “This practice is based on the conventional wisdom that a disorganized and messy environment can clutter one‟s mind and complicate one‟s judgments. However, not all evidence supports this conventional link between a messy environment and a messy mind.”
In a series of six studies, the authors found that individuals who were reminded of messiness via a language task, worked at disorganized desks, or shopped in a store they perceived as disorganized displayed tendencies toward simplicity in a number of ways. “They categorized products in a simpler manner, were willing to pay more for a t-shirt that depicts a simple-looking picture, and sought less variety in their choices.”
The authors found that the messiness effect didn‟t affect liberals as much as conservatives because liberals were generally less concerned about being disorganized. “Specifically, conservatives, when confronted with a messy environment (compared to a clean environment), were willing to pay more for a t-shirt with a simple-looking picture. Liberals‟ willingness to pay for this shirt was not affected by messiness,” the authors explain.
The authors‟ study shows that experiencing messiness decreases consumers‟ cognitive complexity and induces them to form simple representations of product information (heuristic information processing). “Messy desks may not be as detrimental as they appear to be, as applying heuristic approaches can rather boost work efficiency or enhance employees‟ creativity in problem solving,” the authors conclude.

Who’s Wealthy? Beyond Net Worth, Asset and Debt Levels Change Our Perceptions

2012-01-14T08:35:00.002+01:00

Will borrowing money to buy a new car make you feel richer? It depends on your net worth, says a new study inPsychological Science, a journal published by the Association for Psychological Science. “People’s perceptions of wealth vary not only as a function of their net worth, but also of the amount of assets and debt they have,” says Princeton University psychology graduate student Abigail B. Sussman, who wrote the study with Princeton professor Eldar Shafir. In fact, increasing your assets by taking on debt affects perceived wealth in opposite ways for people who are in the red (their debt outweighs their assets), or in the black (their assets outweigh their debt).

The studies recruited participants from the online platform Mechanical Turk. All were U.S. residents, average age 36, with average household incomes from $50,000 to $75,000. In six experiments, subjects considered pairs of financial profiles. In each pair, both profiles had equal positive or negative net worth, but one indicated lower debt and lower assets, while the other had relatively higher debt and assets. The first experiment tested perceptions: Participants were asked which person or household was financially better off. Whether shown brief, hypothetical descriptions or the detailed finances of actual households—including stocks, home values, student loans, and mortgages—the results were the same. When net worth was positive, more respondents called those with less debt wealthier than those with higher debt and more assets. By contrast, those in the red were perceived as wealthier when they had higher assets, even though accompanied by higher debt.

Do such perceptions lead to different decisions? Considering similar profile pairs, subjects were asked whether they’d borrow to buy something they couldn’t pay for outright—a luxury like a motorcycle or a necessity like bathroom repairs—or whether, as a loan officer, they’d lend to someone to do so. Again, positive-net-worth people with low debt and negative-net-worth people with high assets were more likely to borrow or be seen as credit worthy.

Why these fickle responses? “People generally like assets and dislike debt, but they tend to focus more on one or the other depending on their net worth,” says Sussman. “We find that if you have positive net worth, your attention is more likely to be drawn to debt, which stands out against the positive background.” On the other hand, “when things are bad, people find comfort in their assets, which get more attention.”

These findings challenge classical theories that net worth matters most in people’s feelings about their financial situations. And, says Sussman, understanding the nuances the study reveals can help predict economic behavior that otherwise appears puzzling. A person deep in debt may borrow to buy a new car, while a person with positive net worth may skip the loan and the car. And both are likely to feel wealthier for doing so.

Feeling blue? New insight to predicting consumer emotions

2012-01-11T07:37:00.002+01:00

It's no secret that emotions influence peoples' decisions about what, when and how they buy. Whether choosing between a movie and a play, deciding whether to attend a sporting event shortly before an important event or selecting an indulgent breakfast treat in anticipation of a tough day at work, consumers' choices are often guided by how they expect their purchase will make them feel. New research by Jane Ebert, a professor of marketing at the University of Minnesota's Carlson School of Management, reveals that how we go about predicting our emotions can lead to very different outcomes.
In a series of four studies, Ebert and co-authors Daniel Gilbert (Harvard) and Timothy Wilson (University of Virginia) use methods of prediction called forecasting and backcasting to show how they lead to quite different outcomes. Consumers can predict their feelings following an event by forecasting--first imagining their feelings when the event occurs ("I'll be very unhappy if I see the Red Sox lose today") and then considering how those feelings might change over time ("…but I'll probably feel better in a few days, in time for my birthday party"). Alternatively, they can predict their feelings following an event by backcasting-first imagining their feelings in a future period ("I'm going to be happy in a few days because my birthday party is coming up") and then considering the effects of the event ("…and if I see the Red Sox lose today it won't change that much").
For example, a person who sees an ad for a Caribbean Cruise in the dead of winter would expect to enjoy the trip more if the copy read, "Winter getting you down? How's it going to feel after three more weeks of this? Wouldn't a sun-filled tropical vacation help? Book one today," than if the ad simply touted the trip before invoking the customer's feelings. By first getting buyers to think ahead to more winter, the advertisement actually makes them consider the effects of the vacation on their feeling more then if they just think about the vacation.
People make a lot of decisions based on how they expect their choices to make them feel. "We found that we can easily change a consumer's expectations of those feelings," said Ebert. The differences in the information that forecasters and backcasters consider and the predictions that they make suggest that simply changing the order in which consumers think about a potential consumption event and how they expect to feel in the future can markedly change expectations about their feelings as a result of the event.

People Mimic Each Other, But We Aren’t Chameleons

2012-01-11T07:22:00.001+01:00

It’s easy to pick up on the movements that other people make—scratching your head, crossing your legs. But a new study published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, finds that people only feel the urge to mimic each other when they have the same goal.

It’s common for people to pick up on each other’s movements. “This is the notion that when you’re having a conversation with somebody and you don’t care where your hands are, and the other person scratches their head, you scratch your head,” says Sasha Ondobaka of the Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour at Radboud University Nijmegen in the Netherlands. He cowrote the paper with Floris P. de Lange, Michael Wiemers, and Harold Bekkering of Radboud and Roger D. Newman-Norlund of the University of South Carolina. This kind of mimicry is well-established, but Ondobaka and his colleagues suspected that what people mimic depends on their goals.

“If you and I both want to drink coffee, it would be good for me to synchronize my movement with yours,” Ondobaka says. “But if you’re going for a walk and I need coffee, it wouldn’t make sense to be coupled on this movement level.”

Ondobaka and his colleagues devised an experiment to see how much of a pull people feel to mimic when they have the same or different goals from someone else. Each participant sat across from an experimenter. They played a sort of card game on a touch screen embedded in the table between. First, two cards appeared in front of the experimenter, who chose either the higher or the lower card. Then two cards appeared in front of the participant. This happened 16 times in a row. For some 16-game series, the participant was told to do the same as the experimenter—to choose the higher (or lower) card. For others, they were told to do the opposite. Participants were told to move as quickly and as accurately as possible.

When the participant was supposed to make the same choice as the experimenter, they moved faster when they were also reaching in the same direction as the experimenter. But when they were told to do the opposite of the experimenter—when they had different goals—they didn’t go any faster when making the same movement as the other person. This means having different goals got in the way of the urge to mimic, Ondobaka says.

The researchers think that people only copy each other’s movements when they’re trying to accomplish the same thing. The rest of the time, actions are more related to your internal goals. “We’re not walking around like chameleons copying everything,” Ondobaka says. If you’re on a busy street with dozens of people in view, you’re not copying everything everybody does—just the ones that have the same goal as you. “If a colleague or a friend is going with you, you will cross the street together.”

People Don’t Just Think with Their Guts; Logic Plays a Role Too

2012-01-09T10:31:00.000+01:00

For decades, science has suggested that when people make decisions, they tend to ignore logic and go with the gut. But Wim De Neys, a psychological scientist at the University of Toulouse in France, has a new suggestion: Maybe thinking about logic is also intuitive. He writes about this idea in the January issue of Perspectives on Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.

Psychologists have partly based their conclusions about reasoning and decision-making on questions like this one:

“Bill is 34. He is intelligent, punctual but unimaginative and somewhat lifeless. In school, he was strong in mathematics but weak in social studies and humanities.

Which one of the following statements is most likely?

(a) Bill plays in a rock band for a hobby.

(b) Bill is an accountant and plays in a rock band for a hobby.”

Most people will let their stereotypes about accountants rule and pick (b). But, in fact, we have no idea what Bill does for a living—he could be a politician, a concert pianist, or a drug dealer—so it’s more likely that only one random possibility, the rock band, is true, than that both (a) and (b) would happen to be true.

This line of research has suggested that people don’t use logic when making decisions about the world. But the truth is more complicated, De Neys says. When most people read a question like the one above, there’s a sense that something isn’t quite right. “That feeling you have, that there’s something fishy about the problem—we have a wide range of ways to measure that conflict,” De Neys says. For example, he has shown with brain imaging that when people are thinking about this kind of problem, a part of their brain that deals with conflict is active. “They stick to their gut feeling and don’t do the logical thing, but they do sense that what they are doing is wrong,” De Neys says.

De Neys thinks this sense, that something isn’t quite right with the decision you’re making, comes from an intuitive sense of logic. Other scientists have found that children start thinking logically very early. In one study, 8-month-old babies were surprised if someone pulled mostly red balls out of a box that contained mostly white balls, proof that babies have an innate sense of probability before they can even talk. It makes sense, De Neys says, that this intuitive sense of logic would stick around in adults.

This research deals with the basics of how we think, but De Neys says it may help explain more complex decision-making. If you want to teach people to make better decisions, he says, “It’s important to know which component of the process is faulty.” For example, if you want to understand why people are smoking, and you think it’s because they don’t understand the logic—that smoking kills—you might put a lot of energy into explaining how smoking is bad for them, when the actual problem is addiction. It’s a long way from a question about Bill’s career to understanding something like why someone decides to get married, for example; but research like this should help,” De Neys says.

15 Trends that matters in 2012

2012-01-09T07:32:00.000+01:00

2012 Edition: 15 Business & Marketing Trends That Matter

View more presentations from Rohit Bhargava

Goodbye Kodak!

2012-01-09T07:30:00.000+01:00

The lifecycle of any product, company or brand has an end. Kodak filed for bankruptcy recently and the question is which brands will follow it´s example during 2012.

Here are a few predictions from Business Insider...click here.

Texting is so 2011

2012-01-03T07:08:00.000+01:00

100 Things to Watch in 2012

2011-12-27T07:45:00.001+01:00

JWT: 100 Things to Watch in 2012

View more presentations from JWTIntelligence

Making Social Media Pay

2011-12-20T09:37:00.002+01:00

Download by clicking here.

The 21 most horrific social media facepalms of 2011

2011-12-16T07:58:00.001+01:00

Read about them by clicking here.

Thanks Phil!

Do Consumers Prefer Brands that Appear on their Facebook Pages?

2011-12-15T07:31:00.001+01:00

You are likely to identify with a brand that advertises alongside your personal information on a Facebook page (especially if you have high self-esteem), according to a new study in the Journal of Consumer Research. The same ad will have less impact if you view it on a stranger’s page.

“The vast majority of marketing exposures are experienced under conditions of low attention and little cognitive involvement,” write authors Andrew W. Perkins (University of Western Ontario) and Mark R. Forehand (University of Washington, Seattle). “The current research demonstrates that brand identification can form even in these low-involvement conditions if the brand is merely presented simultaneously with self-related information.”

This concept, called “implicit self-referencing,” suggests that consumers don’t need to own, choose, or endorse a brand to identify with it. The authors believe this occurs because most consumers possess high self-esteem and when brand concepts are linked to consumers’ self-concepts, some of those positive feelings rub off onto the brands.

In one experiment, the authors asked participants to sort fictitious brand names with terms related to “self” or “other”; their attitudes toward the “self” brands were more positive. In another experiment, they found that the effect was stronger for individuals who had higher self-esteem. And in a third study, they demonstrated that the effect occurs when brands are simply presented near consumers’ personal content on a social networking site.

Participants were instructed to compare the interfaces of two social networking sites (Facebook and hi5) while fictitious car ads rotated through banner ads. Later, participants reported that they much preferred brands that had appeared (without them being conscious of it) on their own pages. “These results show that the car brands did not benefit from Facebook directly, but rather from their proximity to the consumers’ personal content.”

“Consumers are increasingly comfortable posting a wealth of personal information online, and such digital extroversion certainly creates opportunities for marketers to effectively target and embed their appeals,” the authors conclude.

The paradox of gift giving: More not better

2011-12-15T07:24:00.002+01:00

Holiday shoppers, take note. Marketing and psychology researchers have found that in gift giving, bundling together an expensive “big” gift and a smaller “stocking stuffer” reduces the perceived value of the overall package for the recipient.

Suppose you’re trying to impress a loved one with a generous gift this holiday season, says Kimberlee Weaver, assistant professor of marketing in the Pamplin College of Business. One option is to buy them a luxury cashmere sweater. A second option is to add in a $10 gift card.

If their budget allows, most gift givers would choose the second option, as it comprises two gifts — one big, one small, Weaver says. Ironically, however, the gift recipient is likely to perceive the cashmere sweater alone as more generous than the combination of the same sweater and gift card. “The gift giver or presenter does not anticipate this difference in perspectives and has just cheapened the gift package by spending an extra $10 on it.”

Weaver is part of a research team that recently discovered, through a series of studies, what the team has called the “Presenter’s Paradox.” The paradox arises because gift givers and gift recipients have different perspectives, Weaver says. Gift givers follow a “more-is-better” logic; recipients evaluate the overall package.

“People who evaluate a bundle, such as a gift package, follow an averaging strategy, which leads to less favorable judgments when mildly favorable pieces (the gift card) are added to highly favorable pieces (the sweater). The luxury sweater represents a generous ‘big’ gift. Adding on a ‘little’ gift makes the total package seems less big.”

The same contradictory effect can be found in other situations, says Weaver, whose research article, “The Presenter’s Paradox,” co-authored with Stephen Garcia and Norbert Schwarz of the University of Michigan, has been accepted for publication in the Journal of Consumer Research.

“People who present a bundle of information assume that every favorable piece adds to their overall case and include it in the bundle they present,” she says. However, notes Garcia, associate professor of psychology and organizational studies at the University of Michigan, “this strategy backfires, because the addition of mildly favorable information dilutes the impact of highly favorable information in the eyes of evaluators. Hence, presenters of information would be better off if they limited their presentation to their most favorable information — just as gift givers would be better off to limit their present to their most favorite gift."

Weaver and her co-authors found that the paradox was strongly evident in seven studies across many product domains, from bundles of music to hotel advertisements, scholarships, and even “negative” items such as penalty structures.

When asked to design a penalty for littering, for example, those who were put in charge preferred a penalty that comprised a $750 fine plus 2 hours of community service over a penalty that comprised only the $750 fine. However, perceivers evaluated the former penalty as less severe than the latter, Weaver says. “Adding a couple of hours of community service made the overall penalty appear less harsh and undermined its deterrence value.”

The discovery of the Presenter’s Paradox sheds new light on how to best present information, says Weaver. “Whether it is a public relations expert pondering which reviews to include on a book jacket, a music producer considering which songs to include in a music album, or a legal team building up arguments for a case, they all face the important task of deciding what information to include in their presentations. So do consumers who apply for a job and homeowners who try to sell their house.”

All of them, she says, run the risk of inadvertently diluting the very message they seek to convey by their efforts to strengthen it. “Fortunately, there is a simple remedy: take the perspective of the evaluator and ask yourself how the bundle will appear to someone who will average across its components. Doing so will alert you to the fact that others will not always share your sense that more is better.”

“Prompting consumers to consider the overall picture entices them to adopt a holistic perspective, which allows them to correctly anticipate evaluators' judgments,” says Schwarz, professor of marketing and psychology at the University of Michigan. “But when left to their own devices, presenters are unlikely to notice that evaluators do not share their more-is-better rule.”

2012 Digital Trends

2011-12-13T16:14:00.002+01:00

Battlefield 3 Management Tips

2011-12-13T08:57:00.001+01:00

10 BUSINESS LESSONS FROM THE BATTLEFIELD - EP

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JWT Trends - the easy version

2011-12-13T08:43:00.001+01:00

Holiday Shopping? Why Does Rubbing Elbows Turn Consumers Off?

2011-12-12T12:34:00.001+01:00

Although holiday sales and events try to drive as many customers to retail stores as possible, a new study in the Journal of Consumer Research shows that the crowding may drive them away as well.

The issue arises when crowding results in people actually touching one another. “For managers, a stranger’s touch in the store means the money walks out of the store,” writes Brett A. S. Martin (Queensland University of Technology). He conducted a series of field experiments in stores in southern England.

While in a store, half the consumers were briefly brushed lightly by a fellow customer as they walked out of the aisle. The other half had a fellow customer stand near them but not touch them. The “fellow customers” were relatively attractive people in their 30s. When the customers left the store, their time in the store was recorded, and they completed a questionnaire on what they thought of the store and the item they were looking at when they were touched.

The belief that men like being touched by women they don’t know is not true, Martin finds. His experiments found that customers, men and women, who were touched by male or female strangers while looking at a product quickly left the store and did so with a negative view of the product they were looking at.

“Rather than cramming a store with goods and having narrow aisles, managers should think about giving people space to consider products without the risk of being bumped into by strangers,” says Martin.

“For the brand manager of the product, it is vital that how products are displayed by retailers is considered in a brand’s marketing strategy. It is not just about grabbing a customer’s attention in-store with a good display or price promotion,” Martin writes. “Brands that want to increase sales need to find ways to let customers view a product without being touched by others. If they are touched, they don’t buy, and they leave store with a bad impression of your brand.”

Why Does Stating Your Intention Lead You to Purchase Your Favorite Brand?

2011-12-12T12:31:00.002+01:00

If you say you’re going to buy something, you’re more likely to do it. But why is that? According to a new study in the Journal of Consumer Research, stating an intention leads consumers to action—and makes them more likely to purchase their preferred brands.

“Simply responding to an intention question has the potential to activate an intention,” write authors Anneleen Van Kerckhove, Maggie Geuens, and Iris Vermeir (Ghent University). “The activation of an intention next changes how easily certain brands come to mind, which then influences brand choices.”

In a series of studies the researchers had participants fill in a questionnaire on their preferences among fictitious or existing candy bar brands. Some participants answered an “intention question” (How likely are you to purchase a candy bar in the near future?), while others answered an attitude question (How positive or negative are you about the candy bars available to you?).

“Those who responded to an intention question were more likely to choose the brand they previously indicated they preferred the most, irrespective of whether they were asked immediately after the intention question to make a brand choice decision or whether there was a delay between filling in the intention question and making the brand choice decision,” the authors write.

Consumers are motivated to fulfill their intentions, and this motivation narrows their focus. “The intention puts the intention-related brand to the front of consumers’ minds and pushes other well-liked brands to the back until the consumer has accomplished the intention,” the authors write.

“To the best of our knowledge, these research findings provide the first evidence for the role of a motivational component in the occurrence of the question- behavior effect,” the authors conclude.

Online Brand Comments: How Do They Affect Consumer Decisions?

2011-12-12T12:30:00.002+01:00

Consumer reactions to online comments depend on the number of comments and the reader’s orientation (whether it’s positive or negative), according to a new study in the Journal of Consumer Research.

“How individuals make decisions is influenced by their self-regulatory goals,” write authors Yeosun Yoon (KAIST Graduate School of Management), Zeynep Gürhan-Canli, and Gülen Sarial-Abi (both Koc University). “According to regulatory focus theory, promotion-focused individuals are likely to be sensitive to gain-related information that involves the presence or absence of positive outcomes. On the other hand, prevention-focused individuals are likely to be sensitive to loss-related information that involves the presence or absence of negative outcomes.”

In the authors’ first two studies, participants read either two or six consumer commentaries responding to a news story about a newly introduced fictitious brand of MP3 player. The participants then responded with their overall attitude toward the brand, indicating the extent to which they relied on negative and positive commentaries.

When provided with a large number of mixed commentaries, promotion- and prevention-oriented individuals were biased in expected ways, positively or negatively. Under high information loads, individuals’ processing capacity was limited so they relied on only a subset of available information to simplify the judgment process. But this changed when only a few commentaries were provided. “When information load is low, individuals have higher cognitive capacity to process inconsistent information,” the authors write.

The authors also found that brand names affect consumers’ motivational orientation. Favorable brands, like Sony and Sylvania, activated promotion orientation, while less-favorable brands triggered prevention orientation.

“When individuals are provided with few commentaries, they are likelier to process information that is inconsistent with their motivational orientation,” the authors write. “We suggest that when consumers read commentaries by others they pay attention to the extent to which they selectively focus on positive or negative information.”

Interactive mirror

2011-12-08T19:36:00.001+01:00

Reveal Project - Personal Data Mirror from NYT R&D on Vimeo.

2011-12-06T16:43:00.002+01:00

Download this McKinsey paper by clicking here.

Scary Market Forecast...

2011-12-06T09:19:00.002+01:00

Grantham Qtrly Letter

The Changing Face of Risk Management

2011-12-06T09:08:00.000+01:00

Download it by clicking here.

2012 Trends

2011-12-06T07:19:00.001+01:00

JWT 10 Trends for 2012 Executive Summary

View more presentations from JWTIntelligence

The Moment of Truth

2011-12-02T08:34:00.001+01:00

It's Time for a Moment of Truth - Getting Beyond the Status Quo of Customer Interactions

View more presentations from John Merritt

Would you kill one person to save five?

2011-12-02T08:31:00.002+01:00

Imagine a runaway boxcar heading toward five people who can’t escape its path. Now imagine you had the power to reroute the boxcar onto different tracks with only one person along that route.

Would you do it?

That’s the moral dilemma posed by a team of Michigan State University researchers in a first-of-its-kind study published in the research journal Emotion. Research participants were put in a three dimensional setting and given the power to kill one person (in this case, a realistic digital character) to save five.

The results? About 90 percent of the participants pulled a switch to reroute the boxcar, suggesting people are willing to violate a moral rule if it means minimizing harm.

“What we found is that the rule of ‘Thou shalt not kill’ can be overcome by considerations of the greater good,” said Carlos David Navarrete, lead researcher on the project.

As an evolutionary psychologist, Navarrete explores big-picture topics such as morality – in other words, how do we come to our moral judgments and does our behavior follow suit?

His latest experiment offers a new twist on the “trolley problem,” a moral dilemma that philosophers have contemplated for decades. But this is the first time the dilemma has been posed as a behavioral experiment in a virtual environment, “with the sights, sounds and consequences of our actions thrown into stark relief,” the study says.

The research participants were presented with a 3-D simulated version of the classic dilemma though a head-mounted device. Sensors were attached to their fingertips to monitor emotional arousal.

In the virtual world, each participant was stationed at a railroad switch where two sets of tracks veered off. Up ahead and to their right, five people hiked along the tracks in a steep ravine that prevented escape. On the opposite side, a single person hiked along in the same setting.

As the boxcar approached over the horizon, the participants could either do nothing – letting the coal-filled boxcar go along its route and kill the five hikers – or pull a switch (in this case a joystick) and reroute it to the tracks occupied by the single hiker.

Of the 147 participants, 133 (or 90.5 percent) pulled the switch to divert the boxcar, resulting in the death of the one hiker. Fourteen participants allowed the boxcar to kill the five hikers (11 participants did not pull the switch, while three pulled the switch but then returned it to its original position).

The findings are consistent with past research that was not virtual-based, Navarrete said.

The study also found that participants who did not pull the switch were more emotionally aroused. The reasons for this are unknown, although it may be because people freeze up during highly anxious moments – akin to a solider failing to fire his weapon in battle, Navarrete said.

“I think humans have an aversion to harming others that needs to be overridden by something,” Navarrete said. “By rational thinking we can sometimes override it – by thinking about the people we will save, for example. But for some people, that increase in anxiety may be so overpowering that they don’t make the utilitarian choice, the choice for the greater good.”

Why Do Some People Never Forget A Face?

2011-12-01T08:14:00.002+01:00

“Face recognition is an important social skill, but not all of us are equally good at it,” says Beijing Normal University cognitive psychologist Jia Liu. But what accounts for the difference? A new study by Liu and colleagues Ruosi Wang, Jingguang Li, Huizhen Fang, and Moqian Tian provides the first experimental evidence that the inequality of abilities is rooted in the unique way in which the mind perceives faces. “Individuals who process faces more holistically”—that is, as an integrated whole—“are better at face recognition,” says Liu. The findings will appear in an upcoming issue of Psychological Science, a journal published by the Association for Psychological Science.

In daily life, we recognize faces both holistically and also “analytically”—that is, picking out individual parts, such as eyes or nose. But while the brain uses analytical processing for all kinds of objects—cars, houses, animals—“holistic processing is thought to be especially critical to face recognition,” says Liu.

To isolate holistic processing as the key to face recognition, the researchers first measured the ability of study participants—337 male and female students—to remember whole faces, using a task in which they had to select studied faces and flowers from among unfamiliar ones.

The next two tasks measured performance in tasks that mark holistic processing. The composite-face effect (CFE) shows up when two faces are split horizontally and stuck together. It’s easier to identify the top half-face when it’s misaligned with the bottom one than when the two halves are fitted smoothly together. “That’s because our brain automatically combines them to form a new”—and unfamiliar—“face,” says Liu: evidence of holistic processing. The other marker of holistic processing is the whole-part effect (WPE). In this one, people are shown a face, then asked to recognize a part of it—say, the nose. They do better when the feature is presented within the whole face than when it stands on its own among other noses: again, we remember the nose integrated into the whole face. The researchers also assessed participants’ general intelligence.

The results: Those participants who scored higher on CFE and WPE—that is, who did well in holistic processing—also performed better at the first task of recognizing faces. But there was no link between facial recognition and general intelligence, which is made up of various cognitive processes—a suggestion that face processing is unique.

“Our findings partly explains why some never forget faces, while others misrecognize their friends and relatives frequently,” says Liu. That’s why the research holds promise for therapies for that second category of people, who may suffer disorders such as prosopagnosia (face blindness) and autism. Knowing that the mind receives a face as one whole thing and not as a collection of individual parts, “we may train people on holistic processing to improve their ability in recognizing faces,” Liu says.

Impatient People Have Lower Credit Scores

2011-11-30T15:28:00.000+01:00

Is there a psychological reason why people default on their mortgages? A new study, which will be published in an upcoming issue of Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, finds that people with bad credit scores are more impatient – more likely to choose immediate rewards rather than wait for a larger reward later.

The new paper is by two economists who were working at the Federal Reserve’s Center for Behavioral Economics and Decisionmaking in Boston at the time they did the research. People at the Fed are very interested in understanding how the default crisis came about. “Most often, the reasons economists put forward are, maybe there was not enough screening for mortgage applicants, or securitization, or other institutional reasons,” says Stephan Meier, who is now at Columbia University. His coauthor, Charles Sprenger, is at Stanford University. ”That’s definitely important, but in the end humans make those repayment decisions. So there must be more psychological factors that explain how people make those decisions to default or not?”

During tax season, Meier and Sprenger recruited 437 low-to-moderate income people at a community center in Boston that was offering tax preparation help. Each person was given a questionnaire in which they made choices between a smaller, immediate reward and a larger reward later. This is a common test for seeing if people are willing to delay gratification. The questions offer different time periods and different amounts. The participants also agreed to let the researchers access their credit scores.

Impatient people had lower credit scores. A low credit score can indicate some problems with credit in the past, like failing to pay bills or defaulting on a mortgage. “Conceptually, it does make sense that how people discount the future, i.e. how impatient they are, affects their decision to default on their loans,” Meier says. “Individuals accumulate debt and then have to decide whether to repay the money or use the money for something else?” If they don’t pay off their debt, they will have short-term benefits – any cash on hand is available for something else – but the costs/problems come much later, when a landlord, mortgage lender, or someone else sees their bad credit report.

Meier acknowledges that defaulting on a loan isn’t always a deliberate choice. People may default because they lose their job, for example. “But there is a little bit of strategic defaulting going on, where some people make this cost-benefit analysis” – those individuals rather have more money now and deal with the repercussions later.

China: The Most Valuable Social Commerce Market in the World?

2011-11-29T20:50:00.000+01:00

Read the report from Boston Consulting Group by clicking here.

The Other Side of Things - Why Social Media is Shit

2011-11-24T14:58:00.003+01:00

WHY SOCIAL MEDIA IS SHIT

View more presentations from Luke Tipping

Future of Shopping

2011-11-24T08:07:00.001+01:00

Always On Women

2011-11-21T07:56:00.000+01:00

Always On Women: A survey of how women are using technology today - download the AdAge Insights report by clicking here.

Men Are Funnier Than Women

2011-11-21T07:46:00.001+01:00

Open publication - Free publishing

How Shopping Malls Make You Buy

2011-11-21T07:33:00.002+01:00

Another Day Older and Deeper in Debt: Why Do Events Seem More Important When Consumers Think About Weight?

2011-11-15T18:50:00.002+01:00

Toting a heavy item around may cause you to judge an issue to be more important, according to a new study in the Journal of Consumer Research. But, interestingly, so does thinking about the concept of weight.

“Prior research has shown that the physical experience of carrying weight can influence people’s judgment in unrelated domains such as the importance of an event,” write authors Meng Zhang (Chinese University of Hong Kong) and Xiuping Li (National University of Singapore). “In this research we investigate how such an influence happens and when it will happen.”

In their research the authors measured consumer responses to actually carrying weight as well as their reactions to being primed to think about the concept of weight. The authors found that the metaphorical associations people form are just as important as the physical weight they carry.

In one study, the authors asked some participants to hold shopping bags full of water bottles. Others read a paragraph that described a heavy-duty crane, which included weight-related terms (“heavy,” “tons,” and “loaded”). They asked participants to give an opinion on an unrelated topic: whether it was important to list nutritional information on products. The participants who were primed to think about weight responded much like the people who actually carried weight. They thought the issue was more important than participants who weren’t weighed down—metaphorically or literally.

In another experiment, participants who carried heavy loads were instructed to think about light objects, like balloons and feathers. When they did so, the effect of the physical weight experience on their judgment was eliminated.

“The physical experience can directly cause the mental state or abstract judgment,” the authors write. “The results of our five experiments, however, show that weight experience relies on people’s subjective inference to exert its effect.”

Do Consumers Purchase Interesting Products with Credit and Boring Products with Cash?

2011-11-15T18:49:00.003+01:00

People who pay cash focus on different aspects of products than people who use credit cards, according to a new study in the Journal of Consumer Research.

“Our research suggest that, when it comes to product evaluation, beauty truly lies in the eyes of the cardholder,” write authors Promothesh Chatterjee (University of Kansas) and Randall L. Rose (University of South Carolina).

Although previous research has already proven that consumers are willing to pay more when they use credit cards instead of cash, the authors found that consumer perception of products is also affected when thinking about paying with one or the other.

In the experiments, the authors induced people to think about either credit cards or cash as means of payment. They then examined the ways participants evaluated different product attributes. “We find that people attend more to product benefits when concepts related to credit cards are highlighted in their minds as compared to cash concepts,” the authors write. “On the other hand, when cash concepts are primed, people tend to focus more on product costs (monetary and non-monetary).”

The authors note that consumers develop mental associations about credit cards and cash from early ages. Credit card advertising, for example, links the use of credit cards with highly desirable products and lifestyles and immediate gratification. Cash, on the other hand, is closely linked to the pain of payment.

“While convenient, credit cards do not encourage consumers to deliberate over their spending behavior,” the authors write. “Our findings suggest that marketers may be affecting not just the amount of money consumers are willing to spend but also the nature of the goods and services that find their way into consumers’ market baskets.”

“The effects of credit cards go far beyond increasing consumer spending power and shifting consumption from the future to the present; fundamental product perceptions are affected as well,” the authors conclude.

If Consumers Are Close to Their Fitness Goals, Do They Prefer a Larger or Limited Variety of Related Products?

2011-11-15T18:49:00.000+01:00

Consumers who believe they are making progress toward their goals are motivated by limited product variety, unlike people who think they are further from their goals, according to a new study in the Journal of Consumer Research.

“Consumers often buy products to help them pursue their goals,” write authors Jordan Etkin and Rebecca K. Ratner (both University of Maryland). “For example, if someone has a goal to be physically fit, the person may buy a variety of protein supplements (bars, powder, shakes) to help achieve a fitness goal. We investigate how the amount of variety within a set of goal-related products impacts consumers’ motivation toward pursuing their goals.”

The authors conducted five experiments on a college campus. In each experiment, they varied whether participants evaluated low-variety or high-variety sets of products to pursue goals. For example, in one study, they asked participants to write down a fitness goal and then induced either a high or low sense of progress toward achieving that goal. They next showed the participants a set of six protein bars, differing in flavor only (low variety) or in form (a protein bar, protein shake, etc.; the high-variety set). Finally, they measured participants’ motivation to achieve their fitness goals.

“We found that when goal progress was low, people reported being more motivated to achieve their fitness goal when presented with a high-variety set of six different types of protein supplements rather than the low-variety set of six different flavors of protein bars,” the authors write. The pattern reversed when goal progress was high: Those participants reported that they were more motivated to achieve their goals when they were presented with less variety.

Stores may want to note what kind of customers they cater to when they develop marketing plans, the authors explain; they may want to highlight or minimize the perceived variety among product offerings. “For example, stores like GNC that cater primarily to consumers who have already invested time and energy in being fit may wish to de-emphasize the variety of their product offerings,” the authors write. “Alternatively stores like Walmart that might cater to consumers who have made less progress toward a goal of being physically fit may wish to highlight the variety among their product offerings.”

Put Yourself in Someone Else’s Shoes: What Type of Perspective Makes Consumers Self-Conscious?

2011-11-15T18:48:00.002+01:00

Certain emotions are heightened when we view ourselves from a first-person perspective, while others amplify when we observe ourselves from the outside, according to a new study in the Journal of Consumer Research.

“People often feel various emotions when they recall past events or visualize future ones,” write authors Iris W. Hung (National University of Singapore) and Anirban Mukhopadhyay (Hong Kong University of Science and Technology). “For example, one might feel excited about going to a rock concert, but at the same time guilty about not studying for an important exam; proud about winning an award, but also embarrassed about tripping en route to the podium.”

The authors found that people who are “in the moment” (also called an “actor’s perspective”) experience emotions such as joy, sorrow, or excitement more strongly than people who use an observer’s perspective—as if they were watching a movie of themselves—which heightens self-conscious emotions like pride, guilt, and embarrassment.

In one experiment, the authors asked half of the participants to imagine choosing to attend a concert instead of studying for an important exam. The other half imagined choosing to study rather than going to the concert. The participants were instructed to use either an actor’s perspective or an observer’s perspective.

“Actors felt more happiness but less guilt than observers when imagining themselves choosing going to the concert over studying for the exam,” the authors write. “In contrast, actors felt more sadness but less pride than observers when imagining themselves studying for the exam over going to the concert.”

The authors found similar results across a variety of situations, both real and imagined. They also discovered that actors were more likely than observers to focus on situational circumstances (how much they want something), whereas observers were more likely to focus on how others might evaluate them.

“Emotions people feel are often influenced by the information they attend to,” the authors write. “Hedonic emotions get amplified if we view the situation in the first person. In contrast, self-conscious emotions are amplified if we view the same situation in the third person.”

Tell the Story

2011-11-15T18:41:00.002+01:00

Joe Gebbia: The Power of Story from Piers Fawkes on Vimeo.

The Brain Acts Fast To Reappraise Angry Faces

2011-11-15T07:31:00.000+01:00

If you tell yourself that someone who’s being mean is just having a bad day—it’s not about you—you may actually be able to stave off bad feelings, according to a new study which will be published in an upcoming issue of Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.

Having someone angry at you isn’t pleasant. A strategy commonly suggested in cognitive-behavioral psychotherapy is to find another way to look at the angry person. For example, you might tell yourself that they’ve probably just lost their dog or gotten a cancer diagnosis and are taking it out on you. Stanford researchers Jens Blechert, Gal Sheppes, Carolina Di Tella, Hants Williams, and James J. Gross wanted to study the efficiency and the speed of the process of reappraising emotions. “You can see this as a kind of race between the emotional information and the reappraisal information in the brain: emotional processing proceeds from the back to the front of the brain, and the reappraisal is generated in the front of the brain and proceeds toward the back of the brain where it modifies emotional processing” Blechert says.

Blechert and his colleagues came up with two experiments to study this process. Participants were shown several series of faces and tested on their reactions. For example, in one set, they were told to consider that the people they’d seen had had a bad day, but it’s nothing to do you with you. “So we trained the participants a little bit, not to take this emotion personally, but directed at someone else,” Blechert says.

They found that, once people had adjusted their attitude toward someone, they weren’t disturbed by that person’s angry face the next time it appeared. On the other hand, when participants were told to just feel the emotions brought on by an angry face, they continued to be upset by that face. In a second study, the researchers recorded electrical brain activity from the scalp and found that reappraising wiped out the signals of the negative emotions people felt when they just looked at the faces.

Psychologists used to think that people had to feel the negative emotion, and then get rid of it; this research suggests that, if people are prepared, it’s actually a much faster and deeper process.

“If you’re trained with reappraisal, and you know your boss is frequently in a bad mood, you can prepare yourself to go into a meeting,” says Blechert, who also works as a therapist. “He can scream and yell and shout but there’ll be nothing.” But this study only looked at still pictures of angry faces; next, Blechert would like to test how people respond to a video of someone yelling at them.

How Women Are Using Technology Today

2011-11-14T19:52:00.000+01:00

Download by clicking here.

‘Digital waste’ pollutes the online world as brands fail to listen to what people want

2011-11-10T14:39:00.000+01:00

Businesses are wasting time and money trying to reach people online without realising many resent big brands invading their social networks – according to findings from a global study launched by today by TNS, a Kantar company and part of WPP [NASDAQ:WPPGY].

The findings were revealed by TNS’s Digital Life study, the most comprehensive view of how more than 72,000 consumers in 60 countries behave online and why they do what they do – an interactive data visualisation of the key findings can be found at www.tnsdigitallife.com.

The race online has seen businesses across the world develop profiles on social networks, such as Facebook or YouTube, to speak to customers quickly and cheaply – but TNS’s research reveals that if these efforts are not carefully targeted, they are wasted on half of them.

It found that 57 per cent of people*** in developed markets* do not want to engage with brands via social media – rising to 60 per cent in the US and 61 per cent in the UK. Instead, misguided digital strategies are generating mountains of digital waste, from friendless Facebook accounts to blogs no one reads. This is being combined with ever-increasing content produced by consumers – the study shows 47 per cent of digital consumers now comment about brands online.

The result is huge volumes of noise, which is polluting the digital world and making it harder for brands to be heard – presenting a major challenge for businesses trying to enter into dialogue with consumers online.

“Winning and keeping customers is harder than ever,” said Matthew Froggatt, Chief Development Officer, TNS. He continued, “The online world undoubtedly presents massive opportunities for brands, however it is only through deploying precisely tailored marketing strategies that they will be able to realise this potential. Choosing the wrong channel, or simply adding to the cacophony of online noise, risks alienating potential customers and impacting business growth.”

TNS’s Digital Life study asked consumers around the world whether they actually want to engage with brands on social networking websites – either to find out more or to make a purchase.

Although 54 per cent of people*** admit social networks are a good place to learn about products, the research shows brands must harness digital more carefully if they are to use it to their advantage and deepen relationships with customers and prospects.

The study also reveals big geographic contrasts which highlight the risks of brands employing a catch- all approach that doesn’t take the needs of different consumers into consideration.Fast growth markets** were found to be far more open to brands on social networks. Just 33 per cent of Colombians*** and 37 per cent of Mexicans*** said they don’t want to be bothered by them, while 59 per cent of people*** across fast-growing countries see social networks as a good place to learn about brands. However, even here brands must still plan and manage online engagement carefully to avoid alienating consumers and doing more harm than good, according to TNS.

Matthew Froggatt explains: “Digital waste is the accumulation of thousands of brands rushing online without thinking who they want to talk to – and why. Many brands have recognised the vast potential audiences available to them on social networks; however they are failing to understand that these spaces belong to the consumer and their presence needs to be proportionate and justified.”

“The key is to understand your target audience and what they want from your brand – social networks aren’t always the right approach. If consumers in one market don’t want to be talked to, can you use an alternative online method – creating owned digital media platforms, targeted sponsorship or search campaigns – to engage in an appropriate way that will achieve business results, without adding to the digital waste pile?”

TNS’s Digital Life study also sheds vital light on why people do engage with brands online. 46 per cent of those motivated to post comments on companies do so for the simple desire to impart advice – with Romanians the most helpful online (55 per cent).

Findings showed that more people like to praise than complain online (13 per cent vs 10 per cent). The Spanish are the least likely to praise online, with just one in ten people saying that they would do this, and Argentineans are the most likely to complain about brands online (12.5 per cent).

However, motivations of online commentators can be self-serving. 61 per cent of consumers are driven to engage with brands online by a promotion or special offer.

When examining global contrasts, TNS found that consumers in fast growth markets are incredibly keen to spend more time and money online than they currently do – presenting major growth opportunities for brands.

There are, however, infrastructure challenges still to be overcome in these countries before businesses can really tap into the enthusiasm for the digital world. 48 per cent of people already online in fast growth markets would use the internet more if it was less expensive – rising sharply in Africa, to 81 per cent of people in Ghana, 71 per cent in Nigeria and 68 per cent in Kenya.

Likewise, while just a quarter of people*** in developed markets see social networks as a place to buy products, this rises to 48 per cent across fast growth markets. Some of the most eager online consumers are found in India, where 59 per cent see social networks as a good place to buy products from brands.

And when it comes to online shopping habits, Asian consumers are leading the adoption of group buying and purchase via mobile. Almost half (46 per cent) of digital consumers in China already use

group buying tools - in stark contrast to Europe where adoption rates are as low as 6 per cent in Sweden and Finland.

Adoption of shopping via mobile is also high in the region – 34 per cent of mobile internet users in China and South Korea shop on their phone, falling to just two per cent in Egypt.

Matthew Froggatt adds: “There is a huge appetite for increased internet access and mobile services among consumers in fast growth markets. Digital Life shows that as online communities mature, brands that can cut through the digital noise have fantastic potential to drive rapid growth from this nascent consumer base.”

*Developed markets: Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hong Kong, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Japan, Luxembourg, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Portugal, Republic of Korea, Singapore, Slovak Republic, Spain, Switzerland, Sweden, Taiwan, United Arab Emirates, United Kingdom, United States.

** Fast growth markets: Argentina, Brazil, Chile, China, Columbia, Egypt, Estonia, Ghana, Hungary, India, Indonesia, Kenya, Malaysia, Mexico, Morocco, Nigeria, Pakistan, Peru, Philippines, Poland, Romania, Russia, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, Tanzania, Thailand, Turkey, Uganda, Ukraine, Vietnam.

***This refers to Social Network Users only.

A Brief History of Sharing

2011-11-09T20:19:00.000+01:00

Which Way You Lean—Physically—Affects Your Decision-Making

2011-11-08T07:20:00.000+01:00

We’re not always aware of how we are making a decision. Unconscious feelings or perceptions may influence us. Another important source of information—even if we’re unaware of it—is the body itself.

“Decision making, like other cognitive processes, is an integration of multiple sources of information—memory, visual imagery, and bodily information, like posture,” says Anita Eerland, a psychologist at Erasmus University Rotterdam in the Netherlands. In a new study, Eerland and colleagues Tulio Guadalupe and Rolf Zwaan found that surreptitiously manipulating the tilt of the body influences people’s estimates of quantities, such as sizes, numbers, or percentages. The findings will appear in an upcoming issue of Psychological Science, a journal published by the Association for Psychological Science.

When we count, we think of smaller numbers to the left and larger ones to the right. The researchers surmised that leaning one way or the other—even imperceptibly—might therefore nudge people to estimate lower or higher. To test this hypothesis, study participants—33 undergraduates—stood on a Wii Balance Board that imperceptibly manipulated their posture to tilt left or right or stay upright while they answered estimation questions appearing on a screen. The participants were told they probably didn’t know the answers and therefore would have to estimate; they were also instructed to stand upright throughout the trials. A representation on the screen, below the question, of the person’s posture showed it to be upright even when it was not. The participants answered the questions one by one verbally.

In the first experiment, the estimations were of different kinds of quantities—e.g., the height of the Eiffel Tower or percentage of alcohol in whiskey. In the second, the quantities were all of the same kind—How many grandchildren does Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands have? How many Number 1 hits did Michael Jackson have in the Netherlands? The answers were all between 1 and 10.

As expected, participants gave smaller estimations when leaning left than when either leaning right or standing upright. There was no difference in their estimates between right-leaning and upright postures.

The researchers point out that body posture won’t make you answer incorrectly if you know the answer. “Your body posture may nudge your estimates in a particular direction,” says Zwaan. Adds Eerland: “Posture doesn’t overwrite knowledge.”

Still, says Zwaan, we should not mistake our cognitive processes as perfectly and consciously rational. “Decision-making is not a pristine process. All sources of information creep into it, and we are just beginning to explore the role of the body in this.”

Social Shopping Study

2011-10-31T07:39:00.002+01:00

Performics Social Shopping Summary

View more presentations from Performics

Future Vision of Mobile

2011-10-30T08:15:00.001+01:00

The myth of small packages

2011-10-29T07:40:00.002+02:00

If you believe that good things always come in small packages, University of Alberta researcherJennifer Argo’s new study may change your mind—especially this close to Halloween.

In an article forthcoming in the Journal of Marketing, Argo explores how our consumption behaviours change when it comes to treats like chocolates and candies are placed in smaller packages. She says that people eat more of a product when it is placed in small packages rather that a regular-sized packages. However, she said, those with low-appearance self-esteem—the term researchers use to describe people who are concerned about their body, weight or physical appearance—tend to consume more than the average population, especially when certain conditions seemed favourable.

“The low-appearance self-esteem people ate the most when they were told that the caloric information was favourable (low in calories), when the caloric information was on the front of the package and when the product was visible (clear packaging),” said Argo. “People in the high-appearance self-esteem category—those who did not indicate concerns about weight or physical appearance—still ate more, but there was a big jump in the consumption quantity for [those with low self-esteem].”

Giving in to the dark chocolate side

Argo says that information contained on the packages in the study samples did have an effect on the low-appearance self-esteem participants. This group tended to eat less when the product wasn’t visible, the caloric information was missing or they believed there were more calories in the small packages than what they expected.

She said elements such as a visible product and content labeling information served as cues to the group’s susceptibility, which Argo noted gave this group a false sense of belief that the package would help them manage consumption and help them achieve potential weight-management goals.

While this might be true if only a single small package is present, Argo says that, in reality, small packaged goods are often sold in multiples and her study showed that these helpful, small packages are detrimental to consumers’ waistlines.

“These consumers are basically saying, ‘this package is going to protect me; it’s going to help me achieve my goal,’ and so they relinquish control to the package,” she said. “They throw up their hands and say, ‘I don’t have to worry because the package is taking care of everything for me.’ As soon as they’ve given up initial control, they have no control to deal with that next package that’s presented to them.”

Self-defense against small packages

Argo says that buying the regular-sized packages of these types of snacks and exercising portion control will not only reduce calories, but also save money as well, although she says that some people may still opt to buy the small packages out of convenience. For this group, she counsels that they retake control and limit the number of packages they take out at any one time. And especially with the seductive call of leftover Halloween candies around the corner, Argo says the old adage of “watch what you eat” may not be a bad idea.

“Relinquishing control to small packages is “a very cognitive process; people are purposefully doing this,” she said. “(In the study) we found that if we interrupt the participants, if we distracted them with a task, they don’t fall prey (to overeating).

“When it’s a small package, distractions are actually beneficial in some respects.”

The Divided Brain - Myths vs Facts

2011-10-28T07:28:00.001+02:00

Characteristics of Pop-up Retail

2011-10-26T07:44:00.000+02:00

Pop-up retailing has been around for almost 10 years now and can be considered an established way of doing business. Below you can find a discussion on how the successful players have used this tool and how it fits in a multichannel strategy.

When Do Consumers Try to Increase Social Standing by Eating Too Much?

2011-10-24T08:03:00.001+02:00

Consumers who feel powerless will choose larger size food portions in an attempt to gain status, according to a new study in the Journal of Consumer Research. But there is hope for convincing them that a Big Gulp won’t translate to higher ranking.

“An ongoing trend in food consumption is consumers’ tendency to eat more and more,” write authors David Dubois (HEC Paris), Derek D. Rucker, and Adam D. Galinsky (both Northwestern University). “Even more worrisome, the increase in food consumption is particularly prevalent among vulnerable populations such as lower socioeconomic status consumers.”

Many cultural norms associate larger products with greater status—for instance, the size of a vehicle, house, or TV. The authors tested whether or not consumers used the size of food products to express their status. “Because vulnerable consumers are prone to express their status in order to compensate for their undesirable position and respond to daily threats, this research further proposes that the tendency to use the size of food options within an assortment will be particularly strong among those consumers who feel powerless,” the authors write.

In one of the authors’ experiments, they confirmed that consumers equate larger sizes of food options with greater status. For example, participants perceived that consumers who chose a large coffee had more status than someone who chose medium or small, even when the price was the same.

In other experiments, powerless consumers chose larger pieces of bagels than baseline participants. And the authors found that participants chose larger smoothies when they were at a social event than when they were alone.

But there is hope for our expanding waistlines, according to the authors. When powerless participants in one study were told that smaller hors d’oeuvres were served at prestigious events, they chose smaller items that had fewer calories.

“Understanding and monitoring the size-to-status relationship of food options within an assortment is an important tool at the disposal of policy makers to effectively fight against overconsumption,” the authors conclude.

Social Isolation: Are Lonely Consumers Actually Loners or Conformers?

2011-10-24T08:02:00.002+02:00

Despite the proliferation of social networks, many Americans feel alone and isolated. According to a new study in the Journal of Consumer Research, lonely individuals behave differently in the marketplace than people with strong social networks.

“Despite the popularity of Wi-Fi technologies and social networks such as Facebook, Americans are more socially isolated than two decades ago,” write authors Jing Wang (University of Iowa), Rui (Juliet) Zhu (University of British Columbia), and Baba Shiv (Stanford University). According to the authors, in 2004 almost twenty five percent of respondents in a social survey said they had no one to discuss important matters with.

The authors set out to discover how this growing segment of consumers reacts to social consensus information. “Consumers often construct their preferences based on consensus-related cues and prefer majority-endorsed products,” the authors write. But the authors wondered whether people who feel lonely respond to consensus-related information in the same way.

During their experiments, the researchers asked participants to evaluate products based on information that included social consensus information—the percentage of previous consumers that liked the products. They measured participants’ feelings of loneliness and found that to a large extent, non-lonely people preferred majority-endorsed products (preferred by 80 percent of previous consumers). But lonely people, on the other hand, vastly preferred minority-endorsed products (preferred by only 20 percent of previous consumers).”

But, according to the authors, the lonely people don’t want to advertise their minority status. “Lonely people’s preference for the minority-endorsed products was only found when their preferences were kept private,” the authors write. “They switched to majority-endorsed products once their preferences became public.”

The authors suggest that marketers keep in mind the lonely factor when targeting consumers, like seniors, who might be less likely to respond positively to rave reviews from a majority of customers, for example.

The Cost of Consumer Fibbing: Can It Hurt to Tell a Little White Lie?

2011-10-24T08:01:00.003+02:00

Consumers who tell little white lies to avoid confrontation might find themselves rewarding the people who inconvenienced them, according to a new study in the Journal of Consumer Research.

“Most consumers have told an inquiring server that their cold meal is fine, a hairdresser that they like their unexpected „new look,‟ or a friend that his/her too- snug jeans look great,” write authors Jennifer J. Argo (University of Alberta) and Baba Shiv (Stanford University). But according to the researchers, white lies have negative repercussions for the people who tell them.

In one study, the authors studied consumers who had been made to wait for an unpleasant amount of time. The participants then lied about how they were doing by saying they were fine. These consumers evaluated their wait experiences more favorably than people who didn‟t lie and were more likely to help the people who delayed them—when they were reminded that they should be honest.

In two additional studies the authors demonstrated that this favorable reaction toward the “wrongdoer” occurred because people who are reminded that they should be honest and yet tell a lie experience “negative affect” (emotion).

“One way to reduce this negative affect is to misconstrue the experience by responding favorably toward the person who created the negative experience,” the authors explain. “Indeed, the effects only arise when consumers feel certain about the negative affect they are experiencing and they are certain about the cause of the negative affect (i.e., the white lie).”

For consumers, it is important to know that the negative feelings that arise after telling a white lie can have financial consequences. The authors found that people who told white lies were willing to spend more money for services or tips.

“Thus, Mark Twain‟s statement that „honesty is the best policy—when there is money in it,‟ is very true and consumers should think twice before telling a white lie.”

Is It Best to Withhold Favorable Information about Products?

2011-10-24T08:01:00.000+02:00

Consumers are more likely to choose products when marketers withhold some favorable information until late in the choice process, according to the Journal of Consumer Research. But marketers need to walk a fine line to disclose information at just the right time.

“Conventional wisdom suggests that when seeking to persuade consumers to buy certain products, sellers ought to always „put their best foot forward‟ by providing as much favorable information about these products as possible once they have consumers‟ attention,” write authors Xin Ge (University of Northern British Columbia), Gerald Häubl, and Terry Elrod (both University of Alberta). But the researchers‟ study challenges this view.

Consumers use a two-stage process to make purchase decisions. First, they assess the various alternatives available in the marketplace and screen out those that are not attractive to them. Then they evaluate a small set of products to make a final choice. The authors found that marketers need to strike a balance between revealing too much information too soon or delaying so long that the product doesn‟t survive the initial screening process.

“This research shows that the preference-enhancing effect of the delayed presentation of favorable information after consumers have completed their initial screening often trumps the disadvantage due to the increased risk of the product not surviving the screening, resulting in an increase in the product‟s overall probability of being chosen,” the authors write.

Why does this happen? The authors found the delayed presentation of favorable information causes a shift in the relative importance that consumers attach to different attributes (like price, cleanliness, and size for hotel rooms). They also found that delayed release of information causes a preference boost for the product as consumers compare it to a more “static” competitor, for which no additional information becomes available in the final choice stage.

“These findings have important implications not only for the sellers of consumer products, but also for other „persuaders‟ seeking to influence the actions of target individuals or organizations,” the authors conclude.

What Defines Life Satisfaction for Consumers Living in Poverty?

2011-10-24T08:00:00.002+02:00

People whose basic needs are met get more life satisfaction when they are more connected to others and when they experience greater autonomy, according to a new study in the Journal of Consumer Research. But those who live in dire conditions have little hope of achieving such satisfaction.

“About three-fourths of the planet’s population lives in nations with less than ideal material conditions, defined by low levels of marketplace abundance and lack of bargaining power necessary to access this abundance,” write authors Kelly D. Martin (Colorado State University) and Ronald Paul Hill (Villanova University). According to the authors, nearly half the world’s population lives in absolute poverty, and the poorest 40 percent account for 5 percent of total income. More than one billion people lack access to potable water, and two billion don’t have access to basic sanitation.

The authors set out to examine the relationship between life satisfaction and societal poverty. They looked at self-determination, which stems from conditions of relatedness (connection to important others) and autonomy. “We believe conditions of relatedness and autonomy are important to the poverty-life satisfaction relationship, but argue these conditions depend upon a country’s existence of a baseline of goods and services necessary for survival termed consumption adequacy,” the authors write.

The authors examined data from more than 77,000 consumers across 51 developing nations. They found that the situation for many of the world’s people is so bleak that neither relatedness nor autonomy could provide them satisfaction.

“These findings demonstrate that individuals living under extreme poverty are less likely to experience ameliorating effects associated with self-determination (relatedness and autonomy), revealing the added damage to people who already experience the worse possible material conditions,” the authors write. “Our results emphasize the pervasiveness and sheer hopelessness of individuals living in extreme poverty.”

How Does Hand Orientation Help Consumers Imagine Using Products?

2011-10-24T07:58:00.002+02:00

Consumers need a little help when it comes to imagining using products, according to a new study in the Journal of Consumer Research. Sometimes that means orienting an advertisement toward a dominant hand or helping them picture using the product (like putting a spoon in a soup advertisement).

“Across four studies we show that by simply orienting a product toward one‟s dominant (vs. non-dominant hand) in a visual advertisement leads to increases in imagined product use,” write authors Ryan S. Elder (Brigham Young University) and Aradhna Krishna (University of Michigan).

The authors created advertisements that depicted products with handles (like mugs) or utensils to eat the product (forks, spoons) oriented toward the right or the left. They created the images by flipping images so they were mirror images of themselves.

Simply orienting a product toward a person‟s dominant hand leads to more imagined product use and higher purchase intentions, the authors found—but only for positive products. Specifically, if a right-handed person saw an ad with a bowl of tomato soup with asiago cheese oriented to the right, she was more likely to choose it. She was less likely to want to consume a negative product (cottage cheese with tomato soup) when it was oriented toward her.

The authors also found that participants who held a clamp in one hand while viewing an advertisement were affected by the visual orientation of the ad. “When not holding a clamp, participants have higher purchase intentions for the product when it is oriented toward their dominant hand,” the authors write. “However, when participants are holding a clamp in their dominant hand, they prefer the orientation toward their non-dominant hand, as this hand is free to mentally imagine interaction with the product.”

The authors also found that ads need to be quite literal to help consumers imagine how to interact with a product. “Our studies show that the lack of an instrument to encourage imagined interaction (e.g., spoon) reduced the impact of the visual depiction on purchase in a manner similar to orienting the product toward a participant‟s non-dominant hand,” the authors conclude.

Study says passing mood can profoundly alter 'rational decisions'

2011-10-22T08:31:00.002+02:00

Could a passing mood influence your financial portfolio for decades to come? Can impulses you inherited from your cave-man ancestors influence your financial decisions in the modern world in ways that may have lifelong consequences?

In a word, yes.

Arizona State University researchers report new evidence that passing mood and deeply embedded human impulses can and do influence us as we make important financial decisions. The new findings, just released online by the American Psychological Association(http://psycnet.apa.org/psycinfo/2011-23438-001/), suggest that our economic decisions change radically when either survival or reproduction is on our minds.

The old view of economic decision-making focuses on human beings as acting rational. In the last few years, cognitive psychologists have revolutionized economics by demonstrating that economic decisions are often irrational. One of the best-known examples of such irrationalities is the phenomenon of “loss aversion.”

To a rational economist, $100 is worth exactly $100, whether it’s in your pocket now or on the gambling table. But dozens of studies have demonstrated that the typical person places about twice as much psychological value on keeping the $100 bill in their wallet as they do when they place it on winning another $100.

New research re-examines economic decisions in an evolutionary light and suggests that our decision biases may not be so irrational at all. In a series of three studies to appear in the March 2012 issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, a team of Arizona State University psychologists shows that loss aversion waxes and wanes in flexible ways, depending of whether or not the person is experiencing different fundamental motivational states, such as self-protection or looking for a mate.

The research was conducted by a team led by ASU professor Douglas Kenrick. He is joined by Jessica Li, an ASU doctoral student; Vlad Griskevicius, a marketing professor at the University of Minnesota; and Steven Neuberg, who, along with Kenrick, heads up ASU’s Evolution and Social Cognition lab.

In the first study, research participants were asked how happy or unhappy it would make them to gain or lose $100, or to experience a 30-percentile boost in their financial assets. As in previous research, losses typically loomed slightly larger than gains. But all that changed for participants who answered the questions in a mating frame of mind (after imagining themselves having a romantic encounter with someone they found highly attractive).

According to Li, the first author of the study: “For men in a mating frame of mind, loss aversion completely disappeared and they became more focused on wins than losses. For women, on the other hand, mating motivation led them to be even more loss averse, to focus less on possible gains and even more on the pain of loss.

From an evolutionary perspective this makes sense because reproductive decisions are inherently much more costly for females, who pay higher costs of pregnancy and nursing.

Other research by Kenrick and his colleagues has shown that women (but not men) prioritize a possible mate’s relative position in the dominance hierarchy, which means “men need to be willing to take some chances to win mates,” Kenrick said.

It’s not that men and women always respond differently to psychological motives. When the researchers put participants in a self-protective frame of mind (by having them imagine being alone in a house on a dark night and hearing an intruder breaking in), both men and women became more loss averse (conservative) in their judgments.

“From an evolutionary perspective, loss aversion isn’t always a good thing,” Kenrick explained. “Worrying about losses could certainly have helped our ancestors deal with threats, but it would not have helped men win the mating game.”

The new studies are part of a program of research testing ideas discussed in Kenrick’s book: Sex, Murder, and the Meaning of Life: A psychologist investigates how evolution, cognition and complexity are revolutionizing our view of human nature. One of the key themes of this new view of human nature is that human decision-making manifests “Deep Rationality.”

This evolutionary view of decision-making contrasts with the classic view of economic decision-making (of humans as eminently rational and self-serving) and with the more recent behavioral economic view (of humans as biased, irrational and self-defeating). Instead, Kenrick and his colleagues argue that our biases are rational at a deeper level – designed to maximize evolutionary success.

Long before the ancient Aegeans began stamping coins or the Maldivians started exchanging cowrie shells, our ancestors were making economic decisions – they were allocating their scarce resources in ways designed to maximize survival and reproduction. Natural selection has endowed modern humans with a psychology that encourages us to make decisions in ways that have consistently helped our genes survive, thrive and replicate.

“These new findings are controversial,” Kenrick said, “because they contradict the assumption that economic decisions in the modern world are determined at the conscious level. Instead, it seems that biases our ancestors developed millions of years ago affect decisions we make today – in ways that influence our finances for years to come.”

Noesis Global Retail Trends 2011/2012

2011-10-20T19:53:00.002+02:00

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Consumers Rely on Signage over Other Ad Media

2011-10-12T08:42:00.000+02:00

Businesses looking for a sign on how to prosper in a down economy need look no further than their own indoor and outdoor signage.

That’s because University of Cincinnati analysis of a market research survey of more than 100,000 North American households found that shoppers are drawn into stores and make important quality inferences on the basis of signs.

In fact, one of the surprising finds of the UC research performed in collaboration with BrandSpark/Better Homes and Gardens American Shopper Study™ is just how highly ranked signage is among forms of communication used to provide new product information.

When consumers were asked to rate the perceived usefulness of various media, only television was ranked more highly than signage as the most useful source of new product information.

According to UC researcher James J. Kellaris, “Although television was rated as the most useful source of new-product information, indoor signage (such as those at point-of sale, e.g., signage at the ends of store aisles or at check outs) tied with magazine ads as the second most useful source. And outdoor signage ranked third, followed by radio ads, Internet ads and finally, newspaper ads.”

He added, “So, what we found was that signage, a basic form of technology and communication that evolved in antiquity still works even in today’s Internet age.”

MORE FINDINGS: SMALL SIGNS A PROBLEM FOR SHOPPERS
The survey also explored an important visual acuity issue: driving by and failing to find a business because its signage was too small or unclear.

“This appears to be a major problem,” said Kellaris. “Nearly 50 percent of American consumers report that this has happened to them.”

Although the problem is universal across genders and regions, it varies across age groups.
Surprisingly, this is not a “senior citizen” phenomenon, as both younger and older age groups report more signage communication failure than the middle (35-49, 50-64) age groups.

“What we see is a U-shaped distribution with the younger shoppers being just as affected as boomers and seniors. Surprisingly, 64 percent of women aged 18 to 24 report having driven by and failed to find a business due to small, unclear signage.”

BACKGROUND ON THE SURVEY
The BrandSpark/Better Homes and Gardens American Shopper Study™ is performed annually by leading independent market research firm BrandSpark International in conjunction with the Better Homes and Gardens Best New Product Awards program. The sample for this survey includes over 100,000 North American households, with approximately 63 percent being U.S. consumers ages 18 to 65+.

“The survey provides a goldmine of data,” said Kellaris. “Our ongoing partnership with BrandSpark allows marketing faculty with varying interests to explore the database to uncover consumer insights relevant to many business areas, including the signage industry.”

The most recent survey included several items of interest to those in the signage business, including some critical issues—such as the economic value of signage.

For researchers like Kellaris, the importance of the collaboration with BrandSpark and Better Homes and Gardens Best New Product Awards program lies in the ability to track these initial findings with a massive sampling year after year.

“With an annual survey, one can tweak or add new questions. We can also spot trends, track changes over time,” said Kellaris. “We can even assess the impact of regulatory changes within geographic areas as sign codes are updated. This has implications for businesses and communities.”

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2011-10-11T19:44:00.000+02:00

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2011-10-09T15:07:00.002+02:00

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We Are What We Experience

2011-10-06T08:01:00.002+02:00

Our life experiences – the ups and downs, and everything in between – shape us, stay with us and influence our emotional set point as adults, according to a new study led by Virginia Commonwealth University researchers.

The study suggests that, in addition to our genes, our life experiences are important influences on our levels of anxiety and depression.

“In this time of emphasis on genes for this and that trait, it is important to remember that our environmental experiences also make important contributions to who we are as people,” said principal investigator Kenneth Kendler, M.D., director of the VCU Virginia Institute for Psychiatric and Behavioral Genetics.

“When I was growing up, in talking about the importance of a good diet, we used to say ‘You are what you eat.’ What this study shows is that to a substantial degree, ‘you are what you have experienced.’ That is, your life history stays with you in impacting on your background book, for good or for ill,” he said.

Kendler, professor of psychiatry, and human and molecular genetics in the VCU School of Medicine, and an international team of researchers from VCU and other universities, analyzed nine data sets of more than 12,000 identical twins with symptoms of depression and/or anxiety through the lifespan.

By studying identical twins, researchers have a pair of individuals who are born with identical genetic compositions and a shared family environment. Their environments may begin to change as they begin to make divergent decisions as they get older that come with lifestyle, diet or friends.

Participants completed reports relating to their own symptoms of anxiety and depression in a five-to-six-year period. The participants varied in age and were from American and European population-based registries.

According to Kendler, statistical models, developed by his colleague Charles Gardner, Ph.D., a research associate in the VCU Department of Psychiatry, were used to observe how components of individual variation changed over time. The team observed that as the twins moved from childhood into late adult life, they increasingly diverged in their predicted levels of symptoms, but after that point, stopped further diverging. Further, they noted that environmental experiences contribute substantially to stable and predictable inter-individual differences in levels of anxiety and depression by mid-life in adults.

You Can Wash Away Your Troubles, With Soap

2011-10-06T07:57:00.001+02:00

“Wash away my troubles, wash away my pain,” goes the song. Is there such a thing as soap and water for the psyche? Yes: Metaphor is that powerful, say Spike W.S. Lee and Norbert Schwarz of the University of Michigan in a literature review appearing in the latest issue of Current Directions in Psychological Science, a journal published by the Association for Psychological Science.

Religious rites like baptism make psychological sense, the article suggests. Says Lee: “Cleansing is about the removal of residues.” By washing the hands, taking a shower, or even thinking of doing so, “people can rid themselves of a sense of immorality, lucky or unlucky feelings, or doubt about a decision. The bodily experience of removing physical residues can provide the basis of removing more abstract mental residues.”

One study the authors discuss found that people asked to judge the moral wrongdoing of others saw them as worse when exposed to an unkempt room or bad odor than when sitting in a clean room. In another study, participants asked to think of a moral wrongdoing of their own felt less guilty after using an antiseptic hand wipe; they were also less likely to volunteer for a good deed to assuage that guilt. Even imagining yourself either “clean and fresh” or “dirty and stinky” affects your judgments of others’ acts, such as masturbation or abortion. The “clean” participants in one study not only judged others more harshly, they judged themselves as more moral than others.

Cleansing works for other mental discomforts, too, such as post-decision doubt. To resolve this doubt, people who opted for one of two similar jams felt better about their choice after making the decision, a well-known tendency called choice justification. But if people were given a hand wipe to use, they no longer justified their choice: They had wiped off their doubt. Using soap showed similar results after a bad luck streak in gambling: After washing, participants started to bet higher stakes, suggesting they had “washed away” their bad luck.

But we can’t conclude that people who bathe a lot are happier. “Cleansing removes the residual influence of earlier experience,” says Lee. If that experience was positive, it would go down the drain too. In fact, washing one’s hands after reminiscing about a positive event limits the warm glow of happy memories, leaving people less satisfied.

So was Shakespeare, so monumentally astute about human emotion, wrong to portray Lady Macbeth as unable to wash the metaphoric blood from her hands? The authors’ research suggests she might have had the wrong body part in the soapy water. In one experiment, participants were induced to tell a malicious lie either by email or voice mail. Afterwards, those who had lied “by mouth” evaluated a mouthwash more highly than a hand sanitizer, while those who transgressed “by hand” showed the opposite preference. “Lady Macbeth is an interesting example. Her unethical behavior is with her mouth”—she pushed her husband to commit murder—“but she’s trying to get the imaginary blood stains off her hands,” says Lee. “I won’t push it too far, but it fits nicely with research.”

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Brand name advertising clicks with online shoppers

2011-10-04T07:49:00.002+02:00

Brand names in online search engine advertising campaigns can attract more attention and encourage more sales than campaigns that use generic terms, according to Penn State researchers.

In a study of a major retailer's online marketing campaign, researchers found that more people click on advertisements that appear on search engine result pages and purchase products when those brand names show up in the ads, according to Jim Jansen, associate professor of information sciences and technology.

"Certainly there is a positive correlation between branded terms in a query and branded terms in an ad and clicks," Jansen said. "A branded ad combined with a branded search phrase also generated, by far, more sales."

Brand names are words associated with a company and its products, history and reputation. Hotel is an example of a generic keyword and Marriott is an example of a branded keyword, Jansen said.

To place their ads on search engines such as Google and Bing, companies bid against each other for certain words or phrases that search engine users might use in a query. They also create advertisements that are shown on a search's results page when those queries are entered.

Jansen, who worked with Kate Sobel, undergraduate student, Smeal College of Business, and Mimi Zhang, graduate student, information sciences and technology, studied the data from an actual four-year keyword advertising campaign conducted by a national retailer that sells goods online and through physical stores. The data included information such as the number of times an ad shows up, cost per click, number of clicks and sales revenues generated.

The researchers, who reported their findings in the International Journal of Electronic Commerce, examined the performance of four combinations of the variables -- generic phrases, branded phrases, generic advertisements and branded advertisements. The branded keyword phrase combined with branded advertisement generated the highest average sales, which was 15 times higher than the branded phrase combined with the generic advertisement, the next best performing advertising combination.

Jansen said that another advantage with brand names advertising campaigns is that they are often cheaper because search engine companies such as Google discourage competitors from bidding on brand names and trademarked names.

Jansen suggested that analyzing the performance of branded search engine advertising could help companies calculate the value of their brands. By measuring the performance of branded keyword ads and comparing them with the branded keyword campaigns of competitors, marketers can estimate the value of their brands, often considered a company's intangible, but most valuable, asset.

In Reading Facial Emotion, Context Is Everything

2011-10-03T18:08:00.000+02:00

In a close-up headshot, Serena Williams’ eyes are pressed tensely closed; her mouth is wide open, teeth bared. Her face looks enraged. Now zoom out: The tennis star is on the court, racket in hand, fist clenched in victory. She’s not angry. She’s ecstatic, having just beaten her sister Venus at the 2008 U.S. Open.

“Humans are exquisitely sensitive to context, and that can very dramatically shape what is seen in a face,” says psychologist Lisa Feldman Barrett of Northeastern University and Massachusetts General Hospital/Harvard School of Medicine. “Strip away the context, and it is difficult to accurately perceive emotion in a face.” That is the argument of a new paper by Barrett, her graduate student Maria Gendron, and Batja Mesquita of the University of Leuven in Belgium. It appears in October’s Current Directions in Psychological Science, a journal published by the Association for Psychological Science.

The paper—reviewing a handful of hundreds of studies supporting the authors’ position, says Barrett—refutes the contention that there are six to 10 biologically basic emotions, each encoded in a particular facial arrangement, which can be read easily in an image of a disembodied face by anyone, anywhere.

Facial-emotional perception is influenced by many kinds of contexts, says the paper, including conceptual information and sense stimuli. A scowl can be read as fear if a dangerous situation is described or as disgust if the posture of its body indicates reaction to a soiled object. Eye-tracking experiments show that, depending on the meaning derived from the context, people focus on different salient facial features. Language aids facial perception, as well. Study participants routinely did better naming the emotions in pouting, sneering, or smiling faces when the experimenter supplied words to choose from than when they had to come up with the words themselves.

Equally important is the cultural context of an expressive face. People from cultures that are psychologically similar can read each other’s emotions with relative ease, an effect that similar language or even facial structure does not produce. Culture even influences where a person seeks information to interpret a face. Westerners, who see feelings as inside the individual, focus their attention on the face itself. Japanese, meanwhile, focus relatively more on the surroundings, believing emotions arise in relationship.

The real-world implications of such research are “substantial,” says Barrett. For instance, it offers needed nuance to the understanding changes in emotion perception in people with with dementia or certain psychopathologies, and even in healthy older people, all of whom “may have difficulty accurately perceiving emotion in static caricature faces, but might do fine in everyday life,” where context is available. In law enforcement, “the Transportation Safety Administration and the other government agencies are training agents to detect threat or deception using methods based on the idea that a person’s internal intentions are broadcast on the face.” If they’re learning to decipher faces out of context, “millions of training dollars might be misspent,” says Barrett. This means that a misguided psychological notion could be putting public safety is at risk.

How Your Brain Reacts To Mistakes Depends On Your Mindset

2011-09-29T20:14:00.002+02:00

“Whether you think you can or think you can’t—you’re right,” said Henry Ford. A new study, to be published in an upcoming issue of Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, finds that people who think they can learn from their mistakes have a different brain reaction to mistakes than people who think intelligence is fixed.

“One big difference between people who think intelligence is malleable and those who think intelligence is fixed is how they respond to mistakes,” says Jason S. Moser, of Michigan State University, who collaborated on the new study with Hans S. Schroder, Carrie Heeter, Tim P. Moran, and Yu-Hao Lee. Studies have found that people who think intelligence is malleable say things like, “When the going gets tough, I put in more effort” or “If I make a mistake, I try to learn and figure it out.” On the other hand, people who think that they can’t get smarter will not take opportunities to learn from their mistakes. This can be a problem in school, for example; a student who thinks her intelligence is fixed will think it’s not worth bothering to try harder after she fails a test.

For this study, Moser and his colleagues gave participants a task that is easy to make a mistake on. They were supposed to identify the middle letter of a five-letter series like “MMMMM” or “NNMNN.” Sometimes the middle letter was the same as the other four, and sometimes it was different. “It’s pretty simple, doing the same thing over and over, but the mind can’t help it; it just kind of zones out from time to time,” Moser says. That’s when people make mistakes—and they notice it immediately, and feel stupid.

While doing the task, the participant wore a cap on his or her head that records electrical activity in the brain. When someone makes a mistake, their brain makes two quick signals: an initial response that indicates something has gone awry—Moser calls it the “’oh crap’ response”—and a second that indicates the person is consciously aware of the mistake and is trying to right the wrong. Both signals occur within a quarter of a second of the mistake. After the experiment, the researchers found out whether people believed they could learn from their mistakes or not.

People who think they can learn from their mistakes did better after making a mistake – in other words, they successfully bounced back after an error. Their brains also reacted differently, producing a bigger second signal, the one that says “I see that I’ve made a mistake, so I should pay more attention” Moser says.

The research shows that these people are different on a fundamental level, Moser says. “This might help us understand why exactly the two types of individuals show different behaviors after mistakes.” People who think they can learn from their mistakes have brains that are tuned to pay more attention to mistakes, he says. This research could help in training people to believe that they can work harder and learn more, by showing how their brain is reacting to mistakes.

HIGH SOCIAL STATUS MAKES PEOPLE MORE TRUSTING, STUDY FINDS

2011-09-29T16:32:00.000+02:00

When you start a new job, your boss may be more likely to trust you than you are to trust him or her, a new study suggests. The reason has to with the role that social status plays in relationships.

In three separate experiments, researchers found that high-status people tended to trust people more in initial encounters than did people with lower status. One experiment showed why: high-status people rated others as more benevolent, which led them to trust more.

These findings indicate that having high status fundamentally alters our expectations of others’ motives toward us, said Robert Lount, lead author of the study and assistant professor of management and human resources at Ohio State University’s Fisher College of Business.“People have high status because other people like and admire them. The result is that high-status individuals come to expect that others are going to treat them well, which makes them more likely to trust,” Lount said.

“The road from high status to increased trust is one paved with positive expectations of others’ motives.”

In a workplace, that means that bosses, who generally have more status than their employees, may be more trusting during initial encounters. Of course, levels of trust may change as people work together.“But that initial encounter is really important because it shapes future behavior,” Lount said. “If your first signal is that you don’t fully trust someone, that could undermine future trust development.”

Of course, bosses also have more power than employees. However, one of the experiments showed that it was status, not power, that led to the results found here.

Lount conducted the study with Nathan Petit of New York University’s Stern School of Business. Their results are published online in the journal Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes and will appear in a future print edition.

In the first study, the researchers had 126 college students complete a “Leadership Assessment Questionnaire.” After completing the questionnaire, the participants were told they were being assigned to work on a two-person team. Some were told they were assigned the role of Manager (giving them high status), some were told they were given the role of Assistant (giving them low status) and some were told they were assigned the role of an Associate, working with another Associate (giving them equal status).Prior to working with their team member, participants were asked about their expectations of this person, specifically related to trust. For example, participants were asked to rate how likely that person would be to offer to pay for repairs if he or she borrowed something of value and returned it broken.

The results showed that people assigned to be managers – giving them high status – were more likely to trust their partner than those who had low status. Those who were given equal status fell in between the two extremes when it came to trust.A second experiment took this even further by seeing whether status affected actual trust. In this study, some college students were asked to write about the ways in which they had relatively more status, respect and prestige than others. Other students were asked to describe ways in which they had less status.

After the students were primed to feel like they had high or low status, they played what was described as a decision-making game with an unseen player over a computer network. They were given $10 and told they could send as much or as little of that to their unseen partner. The amount they sent would be tripled and the partner could then return as much or as little of that amount back to the participant.

So if the participant sent the whole $10, the partner would receive $30 and could, presumably, send half of that back – netting both of them $15.

The question for the participants, then, was how much did they trust that their unseen partner would return any of the money they sent?

The results showed that participants who were made to feel they had high status sent significantly more money –suggesting that they trusted their partner -- than did those who were made to feel they had low status.

In fact, 42 percent of the high-status students sent their full $10, compared to only 12 percent of the low-status students.

“These results were interesting because they didn’t rely on relative status – the participants had no idea whether they had higher status or lower status than their partner in this game,” Lount said. “Regardless, how much they trusted others depended on what they felt about their own status.”

In the final experiment, college students participated in the same game as in the previous study, in which they sent money to an unseen partner. However, in this case, students were told they were paired with a partner at another specific university. The partner’s university had been shown in previous work to be clearly perceived as a higher or lower-status university than the participant’s.

This was done to show that the results were related to status, and not power, Lount said. While attending a specific university may give a student higher status, there is no power dimension to this relationship. In addition, participants were asked after the study how much status and power they believed they had relative to their partner. While students clearly indicated status differences with their partner, they did not rate their partner as having more or less power.

Finally, the participants were asked a series of questions rating the benevolence of their partner.

Just as in the previous experiment, participants who thought they had higher status were more trusting of their partner, and offered them more money. Crucially, the higher-status students also rated their partners as more benevolent than did students of lower status.

Their ratings of benevolence were associated with how much money they gave: the more benevolent they rated their partner, the more money they gave.

“When you have higher status, you naturally think others are more benevolent, and that allows you to trust them more,” Lount said.

The findings showed that higher-status participants didn’t think their partners had more ability or integrity than did lower-status people – showing that high status doesn’t just make people think more positively about others in general, he said.

While status plays a powerful role in how much we trust, it does so unconsciously, Lount said.

“Most people are unaware of how their personal status affects their willingness to trust others.”

The Social Media Management Handbook

2011-09-27T09:47:00.002+02:00

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2011-09-26T16:40:00.000+02:00

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