Norm violations disrupt social order, and based on prior research, social order can be restored through the punishment of norm violators. Based on this conceptual framework, the current research examines a prevalent yet overlooked behaviour in the consumer literature by showing that consumers...

Two field studies investigate the importance of social presence (real and imagined) and familiarity with the purchase act in producing embarrassment in the context of an embarrassing product purchase. The results indicate that awareness of a social presence during purchase selection and...

While the majority of consumer research that has studied social influences has focused on the impact of an interactive social presence, in this research we demonstrate that a noninteractive social presence (i.e., a mere presence) is also influential. We conduct two field experiments in a retail...

Although consumers like to touch products while shopping, the authors propose a theory of consumer contamination, positing that consumers evaluate products previously touched by other shoppers less favorably. The authors test the theory by manipulating cues that increase the salience that...

Four experiments demonstrate that self‐threatening social comparison information motivates consumers to lie. Factors related to self‐threat, including relevance of the social comparison target (i.e., the importance of the comparison person), comparison discrepancy (i.e., the magnitude of the...

Three studies investigate the influence of empathy and the level of fictionality of short stories on consumers’ evaluations of emotional melodramatic entertainment. We find that high empathizers’ evaluations are more favorable when the story is low in fictionality (i.e., real) versus high....

This research examines the impact of attractiveness on consumers during a consumption experience. Specifically, it examines the effects of an attractive social influence in the context of touching and contamination of store products by investigating how consumers respond when they see attractive...