We investigate the effects of babyfaceness on the trustworthiness and judgments of a company's chief executive officer in a public relations crisis. Experiment 1 demonstrates boundary conditions for the babyfaceness-honesty trait inference and its influence on company evaluations. Experiment 2...

This article examines the effects of evaluative inconsistencies in product attribute information on the strength of the resultant attitude, as manifested in its predictive ability. The existing literature makes opposing predictions regarding the effects of information inconsistency on attitude...

In four experiments we examine the ability of simple concurrent disclosures to correct invalid inferences about brand quality based on advertising claims. We ensure that the disclosure is always encoded, yet we find that it is utilized to correct invalid inferences only under high-capacity...

Information processing research published in the Journal of Consumer Research has produced theoretical advances in our understanding of consumer behavior. This article highlights two themes that have emerged in consumer research over the past 15 years. These are the interplay between motivation...

Effective communication requires that consumers attribute the message content to its intended source. The proposed framework distinguishes four types of source identification processes--cued retrieval, memory-trace refreshment, schematic inferencing, and pure guessing--and delineates their...

We demonstrate the effect of consumers' lay theories of self-control on goal-directed behavior as evidenced by New Year's and other resolutions. Across three studies, we find that individuals who believe that self-control is a malleable but inherently limited (vs. unlimited) resource tend to set...

Three experiments investigate the emotions that arise from buying or not buying at an unintended purchase opportunity and how they color evaluations of affective advertising appeals that are viewed subsequently. We demonstrate that buying can cause happiness tempered with guilt, while not buying...

A consumer's decision to rely on a friend to act as an agent depends, in part, on beliefs about the friend's knowledge. Three studies examine the role of motivational and cognitive biases in estimating friends' personalized knowledge (e.g., knowledge of one's movie preferences). Results show...