This paper attempts to provide an evolutionary explanation for humans' motivation to strive for money in present-day societies. We propose that people's desire for money is an adaptation of their desire for food. In three studies we show that feelings of financial and caloric scarcity are...

In daily life, people are often exposed to food temptations, such as ads for chocolate or friends offering cookies. This article examines how consumers respond to such food temptations. We investigate whether food temptations, differing in strength (weak vs. strong), lead consumers to eat more...

People frequently fail to see themselves as environmentally-conscious consumers; one reason for this is that they are oftentimes prone to dismissing their more common ecological behaviors (e.g., avoid littering) as non-diagnostic for that particular self-image. The cueing of commonly performed...

The present paper shows that people’s compliance with a request can be substantially increased if the requester first gets them to agree with a series of statements unrelated to the request, but selected to induce agreement. We label this effect the ‘mere agreement effect’, and present a...

Four experiments demonstrate a 'statement bias': questions are more often misremembered as statements than vice versa. Experiment 1 suggests that the bias increases with increasing item comprehensibility. This finding rules out that the statement bias is only due to the belief that statements...

We examined whether consumers seek more or less variety when shopping on an empty stomach. The data show that hunger increases variety seeking when consumers make multiple food choices at once. In a first study, participants in the hungry condition selected a more varied flavor set than satiated...

Marketers present compromise food products (e.g. light chips) as a way to reduce consumers' conflict between the short-term desire of wanting a snack and the long-term goal of a healthy body. Policy makers welcome compromise products as a way to fight the obesity epidemic. Compromise products...

Charities often request donations while offering of a near-worthless token, like a key chain, in exchange. Little research has examined whether such 'exchange' requests are met with higher compliance rates than merely asking people to donate. Our studies suggest that in mere donation settings...

This research demonstrates a novel effect of number type, sharp versus round, on indvidual’s perception of object’s naturalness. In four online experiments (N = 1,041), we demonstrate that individuals perceive an object to be more natural if its properties are expressed in sharp numbers (vs....