Jo Andrea Hoegg

Consumer products often break. When this happens, the consumer is confronted with a decision which will determine how the product is used from that point onward. In this dissertation, I examine the psychological processes at play when interacting with a product that is broken, as opposed to functional, and find that broken products (e.g., broken wagons) serve as excellent creative inputs for generating novel product uses. I provide a synopsis of key theories from the literature on creative problem-solving and argue that functional products facilitate functional fixedness, or fixation on salient or conventional product uses. I present findings from seven experiments examining the effects of interacting with broken products on novel use generation and disposal behavior. I use these findings to argue that functional fixedness is an artifact of a chunking process that occurs when interacting with objects during problem solving, and assert that contextual effects which disrupt this process attenuate functional fixedness and enable the generation of novel ideas. I find that broken products are less likely to be treated as coherent wholes (chunks) and more likely to be treated as disparate parts (decomposed chunks), which reduces functional fixedness and allows for the generation of uses which deviate from the norm. Furthermore, I find evidence that the chunking of functional products and the chunk decomposition of broken products impacts recycling behavior; broken products are recycled more readily as a result of being viewed in terms of their component parts, facilitating the sorting of product components into separate recycling bins. I conclude by discussing the theoretical and managerial implications of these findings and suggest that designing products with disassembly in mind may facilitate creative reuse and recycling behaviors, reducing the amount of waste caused by the rapid acquisition, consumption, and disposal of consumer products.

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Cooperation is essential to a well-functioning organization. Punishment and partner choice are recognized as two mechanisms through which cooperation can be promoted within groups and organizations: People cooperate and are rewarded by further social connection, or fail to cooperate and incur social or material sanctions. While both punishment and partner choice can help promote cooperation, these mechanisms can also carry certain personal costs for the punisher or chooser and thus warrant further exploration. In this dissertation, I examine the reputational implications of punishment and partner choice behaviours. First, I examine the reputational consequences of punishing, and in particular I test whether the reputational consequences vary depending upon the punisher’s perceived motive for the punishment. Second, I examine the reputational consequences of choosing a partner who exhibits a willingness to cooperate over a partner who exhibits an ability to cooperate. I further test whether people are aware of the reputational benefits they are garnering as a result of their partner choice decisions, whether they change their partner choice decisions depending upon certain factors within their environment, and whether such reputational effects serve as honest signals. Altogether, I explore the reputational implications of individuals’ punishment behavior and their partner selection.

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There is compelling evidence that the physical presence of others influences the decisions and behaviour of individuals. Recently in social presence research, the focus has turned to the influence of implied social presence, i.e., the knowledge or belief that one's behaviour is being (or could be) watched by another. The aim of this thesis is to establish how real and implied presence are similar or different from each other, and to investigate potential mechanisms that can account for the observed effects, such as self-awareness, cognitive load, and proximity. In chapter 1 I briefly review research on social presence, both real and implied, and discuss recent work which directly investigates the influence of social presence on gaze behavior and the implications of this work for understanding social attention. I then investigate the current gaps in social presence research, and assess how implied and real presence effects are similar or different from each other. Chapter 2 lays out what is understood thus far as implied social presence effects, investigating the time course of the effect and the role of self-awareness. In Chapter 3, I capture systematic patterns of social presence effects by use of a common metric of visual attention, and apply this method throughout all subsequent chapters as well as honing the paradigm to capture the effects of social presence in question. Chapter 4 uses this paradigm to examine the effects of cognitive load and physical proximity, on implied and real social presence. Changes in cognitive load reveal a quantitative difference between implied and real presence, and manipulations in proximity reveal a qualitative difference. Chapter 5 extends the consideration of social presence to purchasing behaviours. This examination reveals that social presence effects vary for looking behaviours and purchasing decisions, and that the former is a poor predictor of the latter. Throughout these seven studies, a total of 502 participants were recruited and tested. In Chapter 6 I discuss the results, outline their implications, limitations, and identify future studies that would advance further our understanding of social presence.

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Consumers frequently experience negative feelings toward brands; yet existing research has predominantly focused on positive engagements with brands. The current dissertation examines one of the most extreme negative feelings—hatred—and explores how hatred for one brand affects competing brands. Many managers seem to believe that consumers’ hatred for a close competitor would not be harmful or might even be beneficial for their brand. Nine studies using qualitative, experimental, and field data demonstrate that in contrast to managers’ beliefs, hatred for a brand leads consumers to eschew close competitors from the same subcategory. Importantly, such preference shifts do not emerge when consumers are indifferent or dissatisfied. As feeling mistreated and exploited is central to hatred, it triggers concerns about self-protection, which results in avoiding close competitors. Several moderators (i.e., greater variance in consumer ratings and the usage of safety-inducing marketing cues) supporting the self-protection based account are identified. Taken together, this dissertation emphasizes that consumer relationships with brands do not operate in a vacuum. Documenting predictable shifts in preferences for competitors as a consequence of hatred for a brand underscores the importance of extending frameworks of consumer-brand connections to incorporate negative connections and account for effects beyond a focal brand. The findings of this dissertation also suggest that hatred – at least in a consumption context – tends to prompt individuals to be primarily concerned about protecting the self rather than annihilating the hated object (i.e., brand). When consumers experience hatred, self-protection concerns appear to be pivotal in shaping their preferences for subsequent consumption unless alternative motives might interfere and produce different preferences.

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Throughout their daily lives consumers experience a vast array of emotions. At times these emotions are directly related to a consumption context, while other times these emotions are unrelated. While previous research on incidental emotion has generally found that negative emotions have negative outcomes for brands, the explicit effect of fear has been understudied. The present research explores the effect of fear on brand attachment.Across six experimental studies, this dissertation provides insight into the process by which consumers cope with fear and how this coping method has positive implications for brand attachments. This dissertation suggests that because people cope with fear through affiliation with others, in the absence of other individuals, consumers may seek affiliation with an available brand. This, in turn, will enhance emotional attachment to that brand. The first four studies of the dissertation highlight the basic process by which fear enhances emotional brand attachment. First, I show the basic fear-attachment effect (pilot study and study 1). Specifically, I show that a fearful experience, compared to a happy, sad, or exciting experience, results in higher emotional attachment to brands, even when consumers are unfamiliar with the brand. Second, I provide initial evidence for desire for affiliation, or perceived shared experience, as the underlying mechanism of the effect (study 1 and 2). Third, I provide stronger evidence for the process by ruling out simple increased consumption as an alternative explanation for the fear-attachment effect. In the last two studies, I examine factors that influence the fear-attachment process. First, I highlight the importance of product presence during the fear experience in order to allow for consumer coping (study 4). Second, I illuminate a distinction between two forms of brand attachment measurement: Thomson et al. (2005)’s emotional attachment and Park et al. (2010)’s more cognitive brand attachment. I demonstrate that a fear experience can facilitate initial emotional, but not cognitive, attachment without the necessity of time. In addition, this initial emotional attachment helps promote cognitive attachment over time (study 4). Third, I show that the fear-attachment process is unique to brands and not products in general (study 5).

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This research presents five studies, a mix of field experiments and scenario simulations, to demonstrate people’s intuition about as well as their actual response towards preferential treatment. I show that while people assume that only positive feelings would arise from receiving a preferential treatment, negative concerns do emerge when the treatment is actually experienced in a social environment, reducing the overall satisfaction and affecting purchase behaviors. I argue and find that impression concern and empathy underlies the negative influences of the social environment. In addition, I show that the failure to recognize these negative emotions when imagining the effects of preferential treatment is due to a tendency to overlook contextual information, i.e., the social environment, when people make predictions in a hypothetical scenario. Implications for theory and managerial practice are also discussed.

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