From One to Many: Toward an Understanding of Multiple Means and Multiple Goals

Consumers often use products, services, and behaviors to help them pursue their multiple goals. They eat fresh produce to be healthy, buy suits to look professional at work, and buy movie tickets to relax and have fun. These goal-related products and services are collectively referred to as "means" to goal attainment. Prior research to-date has primarily focused on the use of a single means to pursue a single goal. This one-to-one relationship between a single means and a single goal, however, is an overly simplistic perspective. Consumers typically utilize multiple means for goal pursuit, and have multiple goals they wish to pursue at the same time. My dissertation adopts this more realistic framework for understanding how consumers use means to pursue their goals. In three essays I explore how the relationships among multiple means and multiple goals, which I define in terms of variety, impact consumer motivation. The first two essays of my dissertation examine how the degree of variety among consumers' multiple means impacts goal-directed motivation. In Essay I, I consider how the motivational impact of having more (vs. less) varied means evolves over the course of goal pursuit, as consumers move from perceiving low to high progress towards goal attainment. Relatedly, in Essay II I consider how adopting a near versus far future time horizon for goal pursuit moderates the impact of variety among means on motivation. Finally, Essay III examines how perceived variety among consumers' multiple goals influences evaluations of means to goal attainment. I identify incidental mood as one factor spontaneously influencing consumers' perceptions of variety between goals. My research has a number of implications for marketers. Highly motivated consumers are more likely to make repeated purchases within goal-related product categories, and also tend to have higher willingness to pay. Thus, from the perspective of marketers, motivated consumers are desirable consumers. These findings suggest how marketers might strategically manage consumer motivation in order to achieve such desirable outcomes. Perceptions of variety, among means and among goals, are malleable. Marketers may thus encourage consumers to perceive their product offerings, or associated goals, as more or less varied depending on consumers' position relative to goal attainment, their adopted time horizon for goal pursuit, and presence use of incidental mood appeals

The Numbers Behind Mushroom Biodiversity

Fungi are among the most diverse groups of organisms on Earth. with a global diversity estimated at 0.8 million to 5.1 million species. They play fundamental ecological roles as decomposers, mutualists, and pathogens, growing in almost all habitats and being important as sources of food and health benefits, income, and to maintain forest health. Global assessment of wild edible fungi indicate the existence of 2327 useful wild species; 2166 edible and 1069 used as food; 470 medicinal species. Several million tonnes are collected, consumed, and sold each year in over 80 countries. The major mushroom-producing countries in 2012 were China, Italy, USA, and The Netherlands, with 80% of the world production, 64% of which came from China. The European Union produces 24% of the world production. Italy is the largest European producer, Poland is the largest exporter, UK the largest importer.Fungi are difficult to preserve and fossilize and due to the poor preservation of most fungal structures, it has been difficult to interpret the fossil record of fungi. Hyphae, the vegetative bodies of fungi, bear few distinctive morphological characteristicss, and organisms as diverse as cyanobacteria, eukaryotic algal groups, and oomycetes can easily be mistaken for them (Taylor & Taylor 1993). Fossils provide minimum ages for divergences and genetic lineages can be much older than even the oldest fossil representative found. According to Berbee and Taylor (2010), molecular clocks (conversion of molecular changes into geological time) calibrated by fossils are the only available tools to estimate timing of evolutionary events in fossil‐poor groups, such as fungi. The arbuscular mycorrhizal symbiotic fungi from the division Glomeromycota, generally accepted as the phylogenetic sister clade to the Ascomycota and Basidiomycota, have left the most ancient fossils in the Rhynie Chert of Aberdeenshire in the north of Scotland (400 million years old). The Glomeromycota and several other fungi have been found associated with the preserved tissues of early vascular plants (Taylor et al. 2004a). Fossil spores from these shallow marine sediments from the Ordovician that closely resemble Glomeromycota spores and finely branched hyphae arbuscules within plant cells were clearly preserved in cells of stems of a 400 Ma primitive land plant, Aglaophyton, from Rhynie chert 455–460 Ma in age (Redecker et al. 2000; Remy et al. 1994) and from roots from the Triassic (250–199 Ma) (Berbee & Taylor 2010; Stubblefield et al. 1987).info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Restricting Choice Freedom Reduces Post-choice Goal Disengagement

Consumers pursue goals by selecting means to their attainment. They might pursue a goal to be healthy, for instance, by choosing healthy snacks or standing rather than sitting at their desk. Making an initial goal-congruent choice, however, often leaves people less motivated to continue pursuing the goal afterward, resulting in a variety of undesirable behaviors (e.g., eating a substantial piece of cake). The current research proposes a novel way to reduce this post-choice goal disengagement effect: restricting consumers’ sense of choice freedom. Three experiments support this prediction and demonstrate why it occurs: by reducing the goal progress an initial choice of means is perceived to accomplish. Restricting perceived choice freedom can thus help sustain post-choice motivation to pursue valued goals. The findings contribute to the literatures on goals and choice freedom, and offer practical insight into how to structure choice environments to help consumers adhere to long-term goals

Pressed for time? Goal conflict shapes how time is perceived, spent, and valued

Why do consumers often feel pressed for time? This research provides a novel answer to this question: consumers' subjective perceptions of goal conflict. The authors show that beyond the number of goals competing for consumers' time, perceived conflict between goals makes them feel that they have less time. Five experiments demonstrate that perceiving greater conflict between goals makes people feel time constrained and that stress and anxiety drive this effect. These effects, which generalize across a variety of goals and types of conflict (both related and unrelated to demands on time), influence how consumers spend time as well as how much they are willing to pay to save time. The authors identify two simple interventions that can help consumers mitigate goal conflict's negative effects: slow breathing and anxiety reappraisal. Together, the findings shed light on the factors that drive how consumers perceive, spend, and value their time