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...

Prior research has found that under certain conditions, small packages can paradoxically increase consumption. The authors build on this work by suggesting that people low in appearance self-esteem (ASE) are particularly sensitive to external control properties (i.e., packaging-related factors...

In seven studies of naturally occurring, “real-world” emotional events, people demonstrated an immediacy bias in social-emotional comparisons, perceiving their own current or recent emotional reactions as more intense compared with others’ emotional reactions to the same events. The events...