The other day, a co-author, Bridget Leonard, was preparing a poster for the upcoming Association for Consumer Research conference. She needed to bring thumbtacks with her on the plane and was not sure would be able to carry them on. I was not sure either. Seriously. If you have spent any time traveling by air, […]
In September of 2002 Fortune Magazine profiled up-and-coming attorney general, Eliot Spitzer, describing him as “unequivocal” in his targeted crackdown of the corruption pervading Wall Street. Later, in his role as governor of New York, this dynamo signed into law strong legislation against prostitution. Less than a year after enacting this crackdown on prostitution, Spitzer […]
Dan Bartels and I co-direct the Moral Research Lab, or as we call it, MoRL. The lab investigates the mental processes underlying morally-motivated judgment and choice, with a focus on consumer behavior and implications for public policy. What makes MoRL different from many other research labs is that we hold our lab meetings virtually via […]
I recent flew between Denver to Philadelphia. We were about 30 minutes early. My return flight was 35 minutes early. Too good to be true, right? Right. How dare Southwest be early! How is it possible that an airline can achieve that kind of efficiency? They certainly didn’t fly faster. That would cost too much […]
The Takeaway is in Denver for a few days. I woke up early this morning (4:15 am MST) to appear in studio with the lovely Celeste Headlee. The Takeaway is a national morning news program produced in partnership with The New York Times, the BBC World Service, WNYC, Public Radio International and WGBH Boston. We had […]
As I mentioned in a previous post, I believe that neuromarketing can provide empirically valuable (albeit financially costly) insights about consumer preferences. A caveat before I begin: I recognize that my approach as an academic to the topic of neuromarketing is likely to be different than a firm that is looking to sell neuromarketing services. […]
Below I introduce the benign violation theory and discuss a paper, Benign violations: Making immoral behavior funny, that Caleb Warren and I recently published in the August 2010 volume of Psychological Science. The benign violation theory builds on work by Tom Veatch and integrates existing humor theories to propose that humor occurs when and only […]
Dan Goldstein at Decision Science News and Shared Goel at Messy Matters recently presented data that suggest knowing what your friends like is predictive of what you like. The post is worth checking out: We measured the extent to which your friends’ behavior predicts your own, and found that in several consumer domains the effect […]
