1,721,136 research outputs found
Rendering sustainable consumer behavior more sustainable : psychological tools for marketing pro-social commitment
Full text linkThis dissertation deals with persuasive communication in the context of social marketing, which is a field devoted to the promotion of socially desirable behavior. We focused on the promotion of pro-environmental behavior. The decision whether or not to behave environmentally friendly confronts the individual with a social dilemma. This is a choice between an option that serves the collective interest and an option that serves his or her self-interest. Choosing the environmentally friendly option is in the interest of others (e.g., the community, society, even future generations) but is often associated with a cost to the individual, like money, time, effort, or inconvenience. Therefore, convincing an individual to behave environmentally friendly implies persuading him or her to pursue the interest of others at the cost of his or her immediate self-interest.
The social marketing approach traditionally relies on the assumption that successful behavioral change towards serving the collective interest, directly follows from having people think about the consequences of behavioral alternatives. Informational and educational campaigns based on this idea have indeed been very successful at generating awareness and concern about environmental issues, but, in contrast, disappointingly unsuccessful at making people change their behavior.
We propose an complementary approach that consists of activating the right pro-environmental value in a more subtle way. We found, using laboratory games with a social dilemma structure, that decisions can be based on either an intuitive or a more rational system. People with pro-social values tend to behave more pro-socially than people with pro-self values when they followed their intuitive system. However, when thinking more rationally, pro-socials and pro-selfs behaved equally selfishly. Thinking seems to enable individuals to find justifications for behaving selfishly. Therefore we present two persuasion techniques, which do not motivate people to think, but which simply suggest or remind people that they hold pro-environmental values. Positive cueing reminds people of cases in which they behaved pro-environmentally in the past, and social labeling describes a person as being concerned with the environment. Both tools were more successful at producing more environmentally friendly behavior than educational campaigns.status: Publishe
Basic Instinct. The fire of desire in economic decisions.
No full textHet doel van dit onderzoek is ons begrip verbeteren van de invloed van cognitie en emotie op economische beslissingen. Vele beslissingen zijn gebaseerd op affectieve reacties en cognitieve afwegingen, maar de relatieve invloed van emoties en cognities kan aanzienlijk verschillen naargelang de specifieke context en situatie. In dit onderzoek, gaan we de invloed na van affectieve processen in economische situaties. Meer bepaald onderzoeken we wat het effect is van blootstelling aan affectieve prikkels op billijkheidsoverwegingen in economische onderhandelingen en op ongeduldigheid in intertemporele keuzes.status: Publishe
Situated Consumer Behavior: The Impact of Bodily Influences on Consumer Behavior
No full textAmple scientific evidence points to the fact that people are influenced by contextual factors when making decisions. In the studies presented in this dissertation, I demonstrate how body feedback affects product evaluations and choices, and feelings of power. The underlying assumption is that the environment and bodily states are incorporated in consumer decision making. In the first essay, my co-authors and I demonstrate that easy-to-grasp products, as manipulated by the orientation of product handles, are more attractive than difficult-to-grasp products and investigate the context-dependency of simulating actions. In the second essay, we show that doing things differently increases novelty seeking among consumers. Finally, in our last essay we explore the different meanings of crossing the arms in front of the body and show that dependent on prior feelings of self-worth, arm crossing can reduce or increase feelings of power.status: Publishe
The instability of risk preferences: time versus money, sexual motivation, hunger.
No full textNowadays time is the scarce resource for many consumers. Economists never deal with ‘time poverty’ explicitly since they typically equate time to its monetary equivalent. Individual consumers do not always seem to make their time-related decisions in the same way as their monetary decisions, however. In my PhD project I would like to shed more light on how consumers allocate their scarce resource ‘time’. More specifically, I will investigate whether consumers’ time-related decisions can be described and predicted by prospect theory’s value function. This value function is characterized by three essential features, namely: 1) Referencedependence: the value function is defined over gains and losses relative to a certain reference point. 2) Both the gain and loss functions display diminishing sensitivity (i.e. the value function is S-shaped). 3) Loss aversion (i.e. losses loom larger than gains). By using procedures that have been established in the domain of monetary decision making, I will investigate whether consumers also value their time according to these three characteristics. In doing so, I will explore important boundary conditions to the generalizability of the value function to the time domain.status: Publishe
Do clothes make the man? Three essays on choice and possession in relation to consumers' self-concept.
No full textA persons self-concept is an idea a mental aggregate of perceived attributes of herself. Literature shows that possessions and consumer choices are important contributors to, and reflections of this self-concept. Consumer choices might provide concrete, observable proof as instantiations of an otherwise abstract mental image that is a self-concept. This proof might be all the more evident in the case where a choice culminates into a durable bond between a person and a tangible object, which is the case when a choice becomes a possession. This dissertation is therefore situated at the interplay of these three: the self-concept, consumer choice, and possessions. In a first essay, we reinterpret psychological ownership based on a construal level theory account to show that possessions are psychologically more close than identical items not owned. In a second essay, and given the close connection between choices and the self, we find that communicating these choices to others in the form of advice can be a source of self-threat when the advice is not followed. A last essay finds that choice situations offering options that pose a threat to the stability of self-views invoke compensatory behavior to counteract that threat.status: Publishe
Seeing it and resisting it: How pre-exposure to temptation enhances self-control.
No full textstatus: Publishe
Essays in consumer behavior.
No full textThis dissertation comprises three essays examining two topics. In the first essay, we take a critical look at research that has shown that feelings of powerlessness increase people’s desire to engage in conspicuous consumption. We argue that experiments that have shown this, have only measured powerless participants’ conspicuous consumption in private. When consumption is truly public, however, an audience may react negatively when powerless consumers signal more status than they truly have. If powerless consumers anticipate these negative reactions, they may stop themselves from conspicuously consuming in the presence of an audience. Two experiments show that the presence of an audience increases conspicuous consumption for powerful participants, but indeed does not increase conspicuous consumption for powerless participants.
The second essay examines consumer psychology’s implicit assumption that conspicuous consumption is an honest or reliable signal of wealth. We point out that although conspicuous consumption is a financially costly endeavour, some people seem tempted to signal more wealth than they truly have in order to win status in the eyes of others. We term this behavior dishonest conspicuous consumption and we show that dishonest conspicuous consumption defeats its own purpose because it leads to lower instead of higher perceived status. We explain observers’ negative reactions against dishonest conspicuous consumption by demonstrating that observers react more negatively to dishonest conspicuous consumption when they are at a similar social level as the observer than when they are at a different social level than the observer. This finding supports the hypothesis that observers react negatively to dishonest conspicuous consumption because it unfairly threatens their own social position.
In the third essay, we show that an increased reliance on imagination lowers consumers' need for control, and therefore lowers the positive impact of information on consumers' liking of pleasurable experiences. Three experiments show evidence for this line of reasoning. We consistently find that imagination lowers participants' need for control, and that the positive effect of information about an upcoming pleasurable experience decreases when participants engage in imagination, compared to when they do not engage in imagination. These results were found with different manipulations of imagination and information, and for different experiences. Two additional studies manipulated the ease with which participants could imagine an upcoming experience to attempt to explain differences in the size of the decrease of the positive effect of information in the imagination conditions of Study 1, 2, and 3. Study 4 found that for difficult to imagine experiences, participants' enjoyment was positively affected by information, but for easy to imagine experiences, their enjoyment was negatively affected by information. The results of Study 5, unfortunately, were inconclusive. This research contributes to research on control by showing that once consumers satisfy their basic need for control through one source (imagination), additional sources of control (information) provide no additional benefits to consumers' subjective well-being, and may even detrimentally affect consumers' subjective well-being.status: Publishe
Self-control depletion: Mechanisms and its effects on consumer behavior.
Full text linkHet doel van dit doctoraat was inzicht te verwerven in de processen die deel uitmaken van zelfcontrole en uitputting van zelfcontrole (d.i. een moeilijkheid om zelfcontrole uit te oefenen na eerdere uitoefening van z elfcontrole). We wilden ook de toepasbaarheid van beide concepten nagaan in een consumentencontext. We vonden in Manuscript I dat één van de meest voorkomende activite iten tijdens het winkelen (kiezen) consumenten vatbaarder maakt voor aff ectieve productkenmerken. We observeerden in drie studies dat wanneer me nsen een reeks van actieve productkeuzes maakten, het meer waarschijnlij k werd dat ze een aantrekkelijk maar relatief duur product kochten (Stud ie 1), en meer heel aantrekkelijke snoepjes kochten (Studies 2 en 3) dan wanneer ze een vooraf vastgelegde aankoopstrategie volgden waarbij ze n iet zelf moesten kiezen. Onze belangrijkste theoretische bijdrage bestaa t erin om evidentie aan te reiken dat zowel actief keuzes maken als weer staan aan de verleiding van affectieve productkenmerken in een winkelcon text zelfcontrole vereisen. We vonden in Manuscript II dat weinig zonlicht de bereidheid van mensen om op de lotto te spelen, verhoogt. We toonden aan dat pogingen tot acti eve stemmingsregulatie die gepaard gaan met slecht weer en die zelfcontr ole vereisen, leiden tot een verminderd weerstaan aan de verleiding van lotto. We vonden in een longitudinale studie met echte lotto verkoopsdat a (Studie 1) dat een verminderde blootstelling aan zonneschijn in de dag en voorafgaand aan de lottotrekking leidde tot hogere lotto verkoopscijf ers, zelfs nadat we controleerden voor andere factoren die gerelateerd z ijn aan spelen op de lotto. In drie vervolgstudies observeerden we dat o p de lotto spelen gerelateerd is aan een negatieve stemming als mensen d e mogelijkheid geboden wordt om deze negatieve stemming actief te regule ren (Studie 2), en dat uitputting van zelfcontrole wegens pogingen tot a ctieve stemmingsregulatie het verklarende proces is voor het verband tus sen een negatieve stemming bij slecht weer en spelen op de lotto (Studie s 3 en 4). Deze bevindingen wijzen dus uit dat zowel actieve stemmingsre gulatie als weerstaan aan de verleiding van lotto zelfcontrole vereisen. We vonden in Manuscript III dat zelfcontrole uitoefenen een smalle minds et induceert. Deelnemers die zelfcontrole uitoefenden hadden een smaller gezichtsveld (Studie 1), gebruikten een smallere categorisatie (Studie 2), en hadden een meer concreet taalgebruik (Studie 3) dan deelnemers di e geen zelfcontrole uitoefenden. Deze resultaten worden besproken in het licht van de mogelijkheid dat een smalle mindset de prestatie op een ge geven zelfcontroletaak verbetert, ten koste van de prestatie op andere t aken. Smalle mindsets zouden dus verband kunnen houden met uitputting va n zelfcontrole. Interessante pistes voor vervolgonderzoek worden besprok en.status: Publishe
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