This study draws on differences between men and women’s attitudes about sex, either as an end in itself (men) or as inextricably linked to relationship commitment (women) to understand attitudes toward the gratuitous use of sex in advertising. In line with predictions, four experiments showed...

PPurpose – The purpose of this paper is to focus on the perceptions that undergraduate students formed and provides further insight into the relationship between perceived teaching quality (with its descriptors) and student motivation. Design/methodology/approach – The paper reports the...

This study examines the effects of incidental similarity shared between a salesperson and a potential customer. We show that an incidental similarity, such as a shared birthday or birthplace, can result in a more favorable attitude and a higher intention to purchase. We argue and find that the...

This research examines how the body type of consumers affects the food consumption of other consumers around them. We find that consumers anchor on the quantities others around them select but that these portions are adjusted according to the body type of the other consumer. We find that people...

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...

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...

Prior research on consumer response to preferential treatment has focused on treatment that has been earned through loyalty or effort, and most of this work has reported positive outcomes for recipients. Unearned preferential treatment (e.g., receiving a surprise discount, getting a free...

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. In...