Favoritism Toward Foreign and Domestic Brands: A Comparison of Different Theoretical Explanations

Five theoretical approaches can predict favoritism toward domestic and foreign brands. This article applies a contrastive perspective to examine social identity, personal identity, cultural identity, system justification, and categorical cognition theories and their attendant constructs. The authors propose a set of main-effects hypotheses as well as hypotheses related to both product and country moderation effects on attitudes toward and loyalty to domestic and foreign brands. They test the hypotheses on a sample of Chinese consumers with respect to salient brands from 12 product categories. The results indicate that three of the theoretical approaches examined can explain only one side of favoritism—most commonly favoritism toward domestic brands—but not favoritism toward both domestic and foreign brands. Consumer xenocentrism, a concept rooted in system justification theory, seems to provide more consistent predictions for both domestic- and foreign-brand bias

In What Ways Do Accessible Attitudes Ease Decision Making? Examining the Reproducibility of Accessibility Effects Across Cultural Contexts

Making attitudes more accessible via rehearsal has been shown to ease decision making by speeding the act of choosing and increasing the correspondence between one’s attitudes and choices (e.g., Fazio, 1995; Fazio, Blascovich, & Driscoll, 1992; Fazio & Williams, 1986). These effects are central to decades of attitude research and are citation classics in social psychology. We report 25 studies (N=6,162 ), conducted in a diverse and culturally inclusive set of samples and contexts, that shed light on the reproducibility of these seminal findings. We examined the effects of attitude accessibility on decision latency, on the self-reported readiness to make a decision, and on attitude–choice correspondence. Results showed that the effect of attitude accessibility on decision latency is highly reproducible across multiple methods and cultural contexts, and that the effect on attitude–choice correspondence also appears robust in choice contexts that parallel the original experiments, but not in choice contexts that highlight the need to consider others’ preferences. Effects on self-reported readiness to decide did not emerge. No robust role for culture was observed in moderating these effects, though limitations of the studies temper these conclusions. In sum, we build on prior research by showing which types of effects are likely to be reliably influenced by attitude accessibility. Keywords: attitude accessibility, decision latency, choice correspondence, culture, individualism and collectivis

Effects of Pictures on the Organization and Recall of Social Information

The role of visual stimuli in the organization and recall of social information was investigated in a study that presented photographs of stimulus persons along with verbal trait descriptors. Paired with four trait descriptors of each stimulus person, subjects saw either (a) no picture, (b) one trait-unrelated picture, (c) four trait-unrelated pictures, or (d) four trait-related pictures. These conditions permitted a test of several competing explanations for the previously obtained improvement in memory for semantic information when accompanied by pictorial information. Results indicated that pictures incremented recall of trait information in two distinct stages—once with the addition of pictorial information and again when the pictures became relevant to the traits. Clustering in free recall on the basis of person categories was unaffected by the experimental conditions. These findings were consistent with the hypothesis that pictures enhance person memory by fostering elaboration on stimulus information at encoding.Lynn80_Effects_of_Pictures_on_the_Organization.pdf: 410 downloads, before Aug. 1, 2020

Spatial-temporal analysis of passive TCP measurements

Abstract — In this paper we look at TCP data which was passively collected from an edge ISP, and analyze it to obtain some new results and deeper understanding of TCP loss process. The focus of our study is to identify the ‘root cause ’ links, i.e., the links that are responsible for the majority of the losses or reorders found on the end-to-end TCP connection. We suggest a new root cause criterion and a cost-effective algorithm to identify the root cause links. The algorithm incorporates a new out-of-sequence packet classification technique. We test our algorithm on the collected and simulated data and analytically justify its correctness. The simulation results show that the algorithm has a 95 % detection rate with 10 % false detection rate. We also analyze TCP temporal loss process, and found that the burst loss size is geometrically distributed. We analyze the TCP time-out loss indication under the Bernoulli loss model, which is the simplest model that can cause a geometric distribution, and show that the behavior of the TCP loss process is not different than when tail drop is assumed. I