Individuals’ physical closeness to one another can either increase or decrease their preference for distinctive products. When individuals perceive their proximity to others to be voluntary, they are likely to interpret it as an indication of their affiliation motivation. Consequently, in a product choice task, they choose options that others consider desirable. When people perceive that their close proximity to others results from circumstances beyond their control, however, they feel that their personal space is violated and experience a need for to express their individuality. In this case, they are more likely to choose products that distinguish themselves from others.

In the present article, we propose that consumers’ initial effort investment in pursuing a goal may increase or decrease the value of the goal and the consumer’s subsequent motivation, depending on whether the pursuit of the goal is perceived to be one’s autonomous choice. When consumers perceive that the goal they pursue is adopted through an autonomous choice, the initial effort investment is experienced as reflecting the value of the goal; therefore, greater effort should increase the value of the goal as well as consumers’ subsequent motivation. Conversely, if consumers perceive that the goal has been imposed on them, they experience psychological reactance that is proportional to the amount of effort that they expend in pursuing the goal; thus, they devalue the goal as they invest more effort in its pursuit and show lower subsequent motivation.

Why do consumers need advice on how to spend their money to improve their enjoyment of life? Why don't they learn this from daily experience? We propose that consumers' opportunity to learn from experience is impaired because hedonic experiences are fleeting. Once some time has passed, consumers rely on their general knowledge to reconstruct what the experience must have been, which is also the knowledge they use in hedonic prediction and choice. Given this overlap in inputs, prediction, choice and memory usually converge, leaving consumers with the impression that their predictions were correct and their choices wise. The actual in situ experience, however, may have been quite different. We illustrate these dynamics with a product many consumers want to spend their money on, namely, a luxury car.

Every day consumers make purchase decisions by choosing among large sets of related products available for sale in the aisles of stores. What factors might systematically affect how consumers make decisions among an array of products? Our research explores one aspect of that question. As most marketers realize, not all shoppers are created equal. Within the same store, one may be searching for a specific product to meet an immediate need, while others may simply be browsing. Just as they can have different goals when they enter a store, individual consumers may approach purchase decisions with different mindsets that can affect how they shop. In social psychology, a mindset is defined as a set of cognitive processes and judgmental criteria that, once activated, can carry over to unrelated tasks and decisions. In other words, if you get a consumer thinking a certain way, that way of thinking — that mindset — can influence his or her subsequent shopping behavior.

The authors document consistent discrepancies among consumers’ predicted, actual, and remembered feelings related to indulgence episodes and conceptualize the underlying processes. Consistent with previous research, consumers expect more negative and less positive feelings when they indulge without a reason than when they indulge with a reason (Study 1) or when they indulge as a consolation for poor performance than when they indulge as a reward for high effort (Study 2). However, episodic reports pertaining to the last indulgence episode show no influence of having versus not having a reason (Study 1), nor do concurrent reports show a difference between indulging as a consolation and indulging as a reward (Study 2). When asked how they “usually” feel when indulging with versus without a reason (Study 3), consumers’ global memories are consistent with their expectations rather than with their actual experiences. These findings have implications for the conditions under which consumers learn from experience.

This study is designed to discover the degree to which ethnic identity and socialization factors influence the culture-specific consumption behaviors of Asian American young adults, in general as well as in specific situational settings. Findings indicated that perceived parental cultural identification tended to strengthen the ethnic identity, which in turn influenced Asian American young adults' culture-specific consumption behaviors. However, although their perceived parental acculturation level had no effect on their ethnic identity, it directly weakened the subject group's culture-specific consumption behaviors. The ethnic-friendship orientation was found not only to influence ethnic identity but also to influence directly the group's culture-specific consumption behavior. Further analysis revealed that a situational factor (i.e., the presence or absence of ethnic friends) influenced culture-specific consumption behavior, regardless of the strength of ethnic identity.