Do Payment Mechanisms Change the Way Consumers Perceive Products?

This is the published version. Copyright 2012 by Journal of Consumer Research.Do payment mechanisms change the way consumers perceive products? We argue that consumers for whom credit cards (cash) have been primed focus more on benefits (costs) when evaluating a product. In study 1, credit card (cash) primed participants made more (fewer) recall errors regarding cost attributes. In a word recognition task (study 2), participants primed with credit card (cash) identified more words related to benefits (costs) than those in the cash (credit card) condition. In study 3, participants in the credit card (cash) condition responded faster to benefits (costs) than to costs (benefits). This differential focus led credit card primed consumers to express higher reservation prices (studies 1-3) and also affected their product choices (study 4) relative to those primed with cash. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR

Paradox and the Consumption of Authenticity through Reality Television

We position reality television within the broader category of consumer practices of authenticity seeking in a postmodern cultural context. The study draws on relevant perspectives from consumer research, literary criticism, sociology, and anthropology to argue that viewers of reality television encounter three elements of paradox in the process of constructing authenticity. The negotiation of each paradox exceeds the process of coping with or resolving their inherent contradictions to encompass the creation of new values. We argue that consumers blend fantastic elements of programming with indexical elements connected to their lived experiences to create a form of self-referential hyperauthenticity

Attention to Social Comparison Information: An Individual Difference Factor Affecting Consumer Conformity

Interpersonal influence in consumer behavior is moderated by the extent of consumer sensitivity to social comparison information concerning product purchase and usage behavior (cf. Calder and Burnkrant 1977). Two survey studies indicate that Lennox and Wolfe\u27s (1984) attention-to-social-comparison-information (AT-SCI) scale has adequate convergent and discriminant validity and moderates the relative influence of normative consequences on behavioral intentions, as predicted. A quasi-experiment and an experiment in which control subjects under no social pressure are compared with high and low ATSCI subjects under pressure reveal that high ATSCI subjects are more likely to comply with normative pressures

The Adolescent Female\u27s Lived-Experience of Obesity

For adolescent girls, negative messages about obesity and body image from society, media, school, family, and peers are plentiful. Yet the lived-experience of obese adolescent girls has rarely been reported in scientific literature. The purpose of this study was to explore the lived-experience of the obese adolescent female and understand the impact of the messages received. A descriptive phenomenological approach was used to conduct face-to-face interviews with eight adolescent girls, age 11-18. Participants were recruited through network sampling and had a body mass index of 30 or more. Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy of embodied perception guided interpretation and data analysis. Seven themes describe their lived experience and reflect the internal and external messages perceived including, false assumptions, myth of perfection, nonculpable diversity, nobody’s perfect, beauty is not skin deep, disengagement, and society’s misplaced focus. Awareness of the livedexperience described in these themes, may guide health care providers to formulate a holistic plan of care that will positively impact both the physical and psychosocial health of the adolescent female who is obese

Endowment Effect as Self-Enhancement in Response to Threat

This is the publisher's version, also available electronically from http://www.jstor.org/stable/info/10.1086/671344.The discrepancy between willingness to pay (WTP) and willingness to accept (WTA) for a product, referred to as the endowment effect, has been investigated and replicated across various domains because of its implications for rational decision making. The authors assume that implicit processes operate in the endowment effect and propose an explanation that is derived from the two main accounts of the effect, ownership and loss aversion. Based on the implicit egotism and self-affirmation literatures, the model argues that selling is perceived as an implicit self-threat and that sellers, as a part of their automatic defense mechanism, respond to this self-threat by enhancing the value of the self-associated object. Five studies test these conjectures and provide support for the proposed model

Alternative Approaches at the Federal and State Level

The reason that the discussions and positions that you heard this morning are no longer being voiced so widely in California is because conditions have continued to deteriorate there rather dramatically. Like the rest of the country, we have a large uninsured population, but the percentage of our uninsured population is larger than the national average as a percentage of the non-elderly population. In the U.S. it\u27s about eighteen percent; in California, it\u27s over twenty-one percent. That means more than five million uninsured people

Credit Cards as Lifestyle Facilitators

Credit cards are an increasingly essential technology, but they carry with them the paradoxical capacity to propel consumers along lifestyle trajectories of marketplace freedom or constraint. We analyze accounts provided by consumers, credit counselors, and participants in a credit counseling seminar in order to develop a differentiated theory of lifestyle facilitation through credit card practice. The skills and tastes expressed by credit card practice help distinguish between the lifestyles of those with higher cultural capital relative to those with lower cultural capital. Differences in lifestyle regulation practice are posited to originate in cultural discourses related to entitlement and frugality

An Attributional Analysis of Resistance to Group Pressure Regarding Illicit Drug and Alcohol Consumption

This article investigates the role of attributional thinking in generating resistance to pressures toward conformity in the illicit consumption of drugs and alcohol. The results of four studies regarding how conformity influences illicit drug and alcohol consumption among high school and college students are reported. In study 1 more than two-thirds of the respondents reported concern for the implications of their own dissent or compliance regarding the reactions of their peers. Study 2 demonstrated a significant relationship between high school students\u27 attributional thinking concerning a peer group\u27s illicit beer consumption and conformity, expressed as intentions to drink the beer. In study 3, in-depth interviews with high school students provided insight into the realism of the conformity scenarios used in the research and the types of conformity pressures experienced by young people. In study 4, locus of causality, an abstract attributional dimension, and several specific attributions were shown to be significantly associated with conformity in the consumption of marijuana

Consumer Self-Confidence: Refinements in Conceptualization and Measurement

The development and validation of measures to assess multiple dimensions of consumer self-confidence are described in this article. Scale-development procedures resulted in a six-factor correlated model made up of the following dimensions: information acquisition, consideration-set formation, personal outcomes, social outcomes, persuasion knowledge, and marketplace interfaces. A series of studies demonstrate the psychometric properties of the measures, their discriminant validity with respect to related constructs, their construct validity, and their ability to moderate relationships among other important consumer behavior variables