Minah Jung - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

Papers by Minah Jung

Journal of Experimental Psychology: General

SSRN Electronic Journal

We are grateful for helpful comments from Stefano Dellavigna, Chris Hsee, and Devin Pope. This re... more We are grateful for helpful comments from Stefano Dellavigna, Chris Hsee, and Devin Pope. This research received no external funding. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research. NBER working papers are circulated for discussion and comment purposes. They have not been peer-reviewed or been subject to the review by the NBER Board of Directors that accompanies official NBER publications.

PLOS ONE

Spending money on one’s self, whether to solve a problem, fulfill a need, or increase enjoyment, ... more Spending money on one’s self, whether to solve a problem, fulfill a need, or increase enjoyment, often heightens one’s sense of happiness. It is therefore both surprising and important that people can be even happier after spending money on someone else. We conducted a close replication of a key experiment from Dunn, Aknin, and Norton (2008) to verify and expand upon their findings. Participants were given money and randomly assigned to either spend it on themselves or on someone else. Although the original study (N = 46) found that the latter group was happier, when we used the same analysis in our replication (N = 133), we did not observe a significant difference. However, we report an additional analysis, focused on a more direct measure of happiness, that does show a significant effect in the direction of the original. Follow-up analyses shed new insights into people’s predictions about their own and others’ happiness and their actual happiness when spending money for themselves...

ACR North American Advances, 2016

ACR North American Advances, 2015

ACR North American Advances, 2018

This dissertation documents consumers’ decision-making when they have an opportunity be both maxi... more This dissertation documents consumers’ decision-making when they have an opportunity be both maximally selfish and kind toward others. Using Consumer Elective Pricing, we explore how social forces operate in influencing consumers’ decisions. A set of three investigations examines how emotion, perceptions of social norms, and anchoring as judgment heuristics operate in influencing consumers’ decisions. We find that each of the three social forces uniquely shapes consumers’ behavior under elective pricing. Consumers are sensitive to the presence of charitable giving but largely insensitive to the scope of their giving when they pay what they want and a portion of their payment goes to charity (Chapter 2). When paying forward, consumers infer a higher level of kindness in others when they are informed about others’ kind behavior, raising their own payments to match their perceptions of social norms (Chapter 3). Inconsistent with the prior relevant research on anchoring effects, we find...

ACR North American Advances, 2016

ACR North American Advances, 2018

Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2019

That two individuals can look at the same stimulus and experience it differently speaks to the po... more That two individuals can look at the same stimulus and experience it differently speaks to the power of construal. People's construals are shaped by their idiosyncratic attitudes, belief systems, and personal histories. Accordingly, amusing delights for children often become bland bores for adults. Eleven studies provide support for a vicarious construal effect: Considering construals one once had but seemingly lost, one ordinarily would have only with more experience, or one would not have had spontaneously, all exert an assimilative pull on one's ongoing experiences. This means habituation can be slowed or stalled by considering another's fresh perspective (Studies 1-6, 8,10), desensitization can be preemptively achieved by considering another's stale perspective (Study 7), and that attitudes toward a movie change by considering how fans or nonfans would see it (Studies 9a-9b). Blind to the power of construal in defining their experiences, participants believed they learned something new about their underlying preferences ("I never realized how much I enjoy anime films!"), not something about the experience-distorting effects of the perspective manipulations. These effects emerged in examinations of positive emotions, negative emotions, engagement, attitudes, and perceptions of humor. Various features of the studies identified which conditions are necessary to produce the vicarious construal effect and minimized concerns that methodological artifacts or experimenter demand produced the effects. The research helps explain why social experiences often differ from solo ones, illustrates a practical technique for breathing new life into old experiences, and demonstrates how people can seemingly learn about themselves by trying to understand others.

SSRN Electronic Journal, 2018

Can social preferences sustain a for-profit company? We analyze panel data tracking payments of 5... more Can social preferences sustain a for-profit company? We analyze panel data tracking payments of 57,196 customers for five years from an online retail firm whose profitability relies on consumers’ altruism. Most customers are generous and remain so over time. However, their generosity slowly declines as they gain purchase experience over time but does not reach zero. Furthermore, stingier, yet loyal consumers contribute cumulatively more to the firm’s long-term profitability than more generous consumers. These results suggest that altruism can not only sustain a firm in market contexts, but it can also be exploited to generate profits for the firm.

SSRN Electronic Journal, 2019

People often make judgments about their own and others' valuations and preferences. Across 12 stu... more People often make judgments about their own and others' valuations and preferences. Across 12 studies (N=17,939), we find a robust bias in these judgments such that people tend to believe that others have more intense experiences than they do, leading to overestimation of others' valuations and preferences. We argue that this overestimation arises because estimations of others' preferences rely on people's intuitive, core representations of the experience itself (i.e., whether the experience is positive or negative). We first demonstrate that the overestimation bias is pervasive for a wide range of positive (Studies 1-4) and negative experiences (Study 5), and is not merely an artifact of how preferences are measured (Study 6). This overestimation bias ultimately forms a paradox in how people think that others tradeoff between valuation and utility (Study 7). Specifically, people believe that an identically-paying other would enjoy the same experience more than they would, but also that an identically-enjoying other would pay more for the same experience. Such paradoxical judgments do not extend to domains unrelated to preference and valuation (Studies 8A-8B), but do extend to other preference measures, such as willingness-to-wait (Studies 9-10). Finally, consistent with a core representation explanation, explicitly prompting people to consider the entire distribution of others' preferences significantly reduced or eliminated the bias (Study 11). These findings suggest that social judgments of others' preferences are not only largely biased, but they also ignore how others make tradeoffs between evaluative metrics.

SSRN Electronic Journal, 2018

We document and investigate the egocentric impact bias-the perception that the social effects of ... more We document and investigate the egocentric impact bias-the perception that the social effects of the self's actions will be affectively stronger than if those same effects were brought about by others. In Study 1, participants thought pleasant or aversive videos would elicit stronger reactions when participants themselves (instead of the random determination of a computer) selected the video for others. In Study 2, participants who considered how to divide (vs. how a computer would randomly split) $10 with another thought the other would react particularly positively or negatively to the self's particularly generous or stingy allocations, respectively. The two studies found support for one of two possible mechanistic accounts. When the self was responsible for the selection, it experienced the stimuli as more affectively intense, thus explaining the bias. It was not the case that all intentional agents (e.g., another participant) were assumed to have more affective impact.

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2018

Defaults influence decisions, but Zlatev et al. (1) argue that people are unaware of those influe... more Defaults influence decisions, but Zlatev et al. (1) argue that people are unaware of those influences and unlikely to learn them. The claim is important and surprising, and it comes as a conclusion to their very thorough piece of scholarship. Nevertheless, the appearance of default neglect may instead reflect the selection and presentation of stimuli. People are both aware and capable of learning about default effects. Participants ["Choice Architects" (CAs)] identified a choice frame designed to generate a particular response in another decision maker ["Choice Maker" (CM)]. Across three different contexts (choices over jobs, medicine, and car insurance), CAs failed to set defaults optimally. Zlatev et al. (1) interpret this as a general failure "to understand or use defaults to influence others." Such a claim depends on the particular default nudge. In fact, when we asked people to set defaults for three examples from the literature, CAs were excellent. We mimicked the default game of Zlatev et al. (1) for retirement savings (2), lightbulb selections (3), and organ donations (4). Unlike the null results reported by Zlatev et al. (1), people chose the optimal default 63.8%, 63.2%, and 68.8% of the time in each of those respective scenarios, and each was significantly greater than chance (details are available at https://osf.io/pq9hb/). Zlatev et al. (1) further claim a more general shortcoming: People do not learn default effects even when seeing the direct consequences. They showed participants a sequence of 20 individual choices, each randomly selected from a pool of CMs. Although, on

SSRN Electronic Journal, 2014

Anchoring, the biasing of estimates towards a previously considered value, is a longstanding and ... more Anchoring, the biasing of estimates towards a previously considered value, is a longstanding and oft-studied phenomenon in consumer research. However, most anchoring work has been in the lab and the results from field work have been mixed. Here, the authors use real transactions from an empirically-investigated and commercially-employed pricing scheme (paywhat-you-want) to better understand how anchors influence payments. Sixteen field studies (N=21,997) and four hypothetical studies (N=3,174) reveal four main points: Although anchoring replicates both with and without financial consequences (Studies 1-2), the percentile rank gap between anchors in the distribution of payments is a much stronger predictor of anchoring emerging than merely their absolute gap on a number line (Studies 3a-5). Second, low anchors influence payments more than high anchors (Studies 6a-6b). Third, findings from the literature that should enhance anchoring effects-anchor precision, descriptive and injunctive norms, non-suggestions-yield null results in payment (Studies 7-13). Finally, the above patterns do not emerge in hypothetical settings (Studies 14a-14d), where anchoring is as big and reliable as the literature has previously suggested.

SSRN Electronic Journal, 2014

SSRN Electronic Journal, 2014

ABSTRACT Four field experiments examined the quantitative and qualitative forces influencing beha... more ABSTRACT Four field experiments examined the quantitative and qualitative forces influencing behaviors under consumer elective pricing called “shared social responsibility” (SSR, Gneezy, Gneezy, Nelson, & Brown, 2010). Under SSR consumers can pay what they want and a percentage of their payment goes to support a charitable cause. Customers in our experiments were sensitive to the presence of charitable giving, paying more when a portion of their payment went to charity (Studies 1-4), but were largely insensitive to what portion of their payment went to charity (Studies 1 and 2). To test possible explanations we examined how consumers’ qualitative concerns to signal a positive image influenced their decisions and found that neither self-selection into paying (Studies 3 and 4) nor social pressure (Study 4) explained higher payments under SSR.

Journal of Experimental Psychology: General

SSRN Electronic Journal

We are grateful for helpful comments from Stefano Dellavigna, Chris Hsee, and Devin Pope. This re... more We are grateful for helpful comments from Stefano Dellavigna, Chris Hsee, and Devin Pope. This research received no external funding. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research. NBER working papers are circulated for discussion and comment purposes. They have not been peer-reviewed or been subject to the review by the NBER Board of Directors that accompanies official NBER publications.

PLOS ONE

Spending money on one’s self, whether to solve a problem, fulfill a need, or increase enjoyment, ... more Spending money on one’s self, whether to solve a problem, fulfill a need, or increase enjoyment, often heightens one’s sense of happiness. It is therefore both surprising and important that people can be even happier after spending money on someone else. We conducted a close replication of a key experiment from Dunn, Aknin, and Norton (2008) to verify and expand upon their findings. Participants were given money and randomly assigned to either spend it on themselves or on someone else. Although the original study (N = 46) found that the latter group was happier, when we used the same analysis in our replication (N = 133), we did not observe a significant difference. However, we report an additional analysis, focused on a more direct measure of happiness, that does show a significant effect in the direction of the original. Follow-up analyses shed new insights into people’s predictions about their own and others’ happiness and their actual happiness when spending money for themselves...

ACR North American Advances, 2016

ACR North American Advances, 2015

ACR North American Advances, 2018

This dissertation documents consumers’ decision-making when they have an opportunity be both maxi... more This dissertation documents consumers’ decision-making when they have an opportunity be both maximally selfish and kind toward others. Using Consumer Elective Pricing, we explore how social forces operate in influencing consumers’ decisions. A set of three investigations examines how emotion, perceptions of social norms, and anchoring as judgment heuristics operate in influencing consumers’ decisions. We find that each of the three social forces uniquely shapes consumers’ behavior under elective pricing. Consumers are sensitive to the presence of charitable giving but largely insensitive to the scope of their giving when they pay what they want and a portion of their payment goes to charity (Chapter 2). When paying forward, consumers infer a higher level of kindness in others when they are informed about others’ kind behavior, raising their own payments to match their perceptions of social norms (Chapter 3). Inconsistent with the prior relevant research on anchoring effects, we find...

ACR North American Advances, 2016

ACR North American Advances, 2018

Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2019

That two individuals can look at the same stimulus and experience it differently speaks to the po... more That two individuals can look at the same stimulus and experience it differently speaks to the power of construal. People's construals are shaped by their idiosyncratic attitudes, belief systems, and personal histories. Accordingly, amusing delights for children often become bland bores for adults. Eleven studies provide support for a vicarious construal effect: Considering construals one once had but seemingly lost, one ordinarily would have only with more experience, or one would not have had spontaneously, all exert an assimilative pull on one's ongoing experiences. This means habituation can be slowed or stalled by considering another's fresh perspective (Studies 1-6, 8,10), desensitization can be preemptively achieved by considering another's stale perspective (Study 7), and that attitudes toward a movie change by considering how fans or nonfans would see it (Studies 9a-9b). Blind to the power of construal in defining their experiences, participants believed they learned something new about their underlying preferences ("I never realized how much I enjoy anime films!"), not something about the experience-distorting effects of the perspective manipulations. These effects emerged in examinations of positive emotions, negative emotions, engagement, attitudes, and perceptions of humor. Various features of the studies identified which conditions are necessary to produce the vicarious construal effect and minimized concerns that methodological artifacts or experimenter demand produced the effects. The research helps explain why social experiences often differ from solo ones, illustrates a practical technique for breathing new life into old experiences, and demonstrates how people can seemingly learn about themselves by trying to understand others.

SSRN Electronic Journal, 2018

Can social preferences sustain a for-profit company? We analyze panel data tracking payments of 5... more Can social preferences sustain a for-profit company? We analyze panel data tracking payments of 57,196 customers for five years from an online retail firm whose profitability relies on consumers’ altruism. Most customers are generous and remain so over time. However, their generosity slowly declines as they gain purchase experience over time but does not reach zero. Furthermore, stingier, yet loyal consumers contribute cumulatively more to the firm’s long-term profitability than more generous consumers. These results suggest that altruism can not only sustain a firm in market contexts, but it can also be exploited to generate profits for the firm.

SSRN Electronic Journal, 2019

People often make judgments about their own and others' valuations and preferences. Across 12 stu... more People often make judgments about their own and others' valuations and preferences. Across 12 studies (N=17,939), we find a robust bias in these judgments such that people tend to believe that others have more intense experiences than they do, leading to overestimation of others' valuations and preferences. We argue that this overestimation arises because estimations of others' preferences rely on people's intuitive, core representations of the experience itself (i.e., whether the experience is positive or negative). We first demonstrate that the overestimation bias is pervasive for a wide range of positive (Studies 1-4) and negative experiences (Study 5), and is not merely an artifact of how preferences are measured (Study 6). This overestimation bias ultimately forms a paradox in how people think that others tradeoff between valuation and utility (Study 7). Specifically, people believe that an identically-paying other would enjoy the same experience more than they would, but also that an identically-enjoying other would pay more for the same experience. Such paradoxical judgments do not extend to domains unrelated to preference and valuation (Studies 8A-8B), but do extend to other preference measures, such as willingness-to-wait (Studies 9-10). Finally, consistent with a core representation explanation, explicitly prompting people to consider the entire distribution of others' preferences significantly reduced or eliminated the bias (Study 11). These findings suggest that social judgments of others' preferences are not only largely biased, but they also ignore how others make tradeoffs between evaluative metrics.

SSRN Electronic Journal, 2018

We document and investigate the egocentric impact bias-the perception that the social effects of ... more We document and investigate the egocentric impact bias-the perception that the social effects of the self's actions will be affectively stronger than if those same effects were brought about by others. In Study 1, participants thought pleasant or aversive videos would elicit stronger reactions when participants themselves (instead of the random determination of a computer) selected the video for others. In Study 2, participants who considered how to divide (vs. how a computer would randomly split) $10 with another thought the other would react particularly positively or negatively to the self's particularly generous or stingy allocations, respectively. The two studies found support for one of two possible mechanistic accounts. When the self was responsible for the selection, it experienced the stimuli as more affectively intense, thus explaining the bias. It was not the case that all intentional agents (e.g., another participant) were assumed to have more affective impact.

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2018

Defaults influence decisions, but Zlatev et al. (1) argue that people are unaware of those influe... more Defaults influence decisions, but Zlatev et al. (1) argue that people are unaware of those influences and unlikely to learn them. The claim is important and surprising, and it comes as a conclusion to their very thorough piece of scholarship. Nevertheless, the appearance of default neglect may instead reflect the selection and presentation of stimuli. People are both aware and capable of learning about default effects. Participants ["Choice Architects" (CAs)] identified a choice frame designed to generate a particular response in another decision maker ["Choice Maker" (CM)]. Across three different contexts (choices over jobs, medicine, and car insurance), CAs failed to set defaults optimally. Zlatev et al. (1) interpret this as a general failure "to understand or use defaults to influence others." Such a claim depends on the particular default nudge. In fact, when we asked people to set defaults for three examples from the literature, CAs were excellent. We mimicked the default game of Zlatev et al. (1) for retirement savings (2), lightbulb selections (3), and organ donations (4). Unlike the null results reported by Zlatev et al. (1), people chose the optimal default 63.8%, 63.2%, and 68.8% of the time in each of those respective scenarios, and each was significantly greater than chance (details are available at https://osf.io/pq9hb/). Zlatev et al. (1) further claim a more general shortcoming: People do not learn default effects even when seeing the direct consequences. They showed participants a sequence of 20 individual choices, each randomly selected from a pool of CMs. Although, on

SSRN Electronic Journal, 2014

Anchoring, the biasing of estimates towards a previously considered value, is a longstanding and ... more Anchoring, the biasing of estimates towards a previously considered value, is a longstanding and oft-studied phenomenon in consumer research. However, most anchoring work has been in the lab and the results from field work have been mixed. Here, the authors use real transactions from an empirically-investigated and commercially-employed pricing scheme (paywhat-you-want) to better understand how anchors influence payments. Sixteen field studies (N=21,997) and four hypothetical studies (N=3,174) reveal four main points: Although anchoring replicates both with and without financial consequences (Studies 1-2), the percentile rank gap between anchors in the distribution of payments is a much stronger predictor of anchoring emerging than merely their absolute gap on a number line (Studies 3a-5). Second, low anchors influence payments more than high anchors (Studies 6a-6b). Third, findings from the literature that should enhance anchoring effects-anchor precision, descriptive and injunctive norms, non-suggestions-yield null results in payment (Studies 7-13). Finally, the above patterns do not emerge in hypothetical settings (Studies 14a-14d), where anchoring is as big and reliable as the literature has previously suggested.

SSRN Electronic Journal, 2014

SSRN Electronic Journal, 2014

ABSTRACT Four field experiments examined the quantitative and qualitative forces influencing beha... more ABSTRACT Four field experiments examined the quantitative and qualitative forces influencing behaviors under consumer elective pricing called “shared social responsibility” (SSR, Gneezy, Gneezy, Nelson, & Brown, 2010). Under SSR consumers can pay what they want and a percentage of their payment goes to support a charitable cause. Customers in our experiments were sensitive to the presence of charitable giving, paying more when a portion of their payment went to charity (Studies 1-4), but were largely insensitive to what portion of their payment went to charity (Studies 1 and 2). To test possible explanations we examined how consumers’ qualitative concerns to signal a positive image influenced their decisions and found that neither self-selection into paying (Studies 3 and 4) nor social pressure (Study 4) explained higher payments under SSR.