How Happiness Affects Choice (original) (raw)

Future-Oriented Happiness: Its Nature and Role in Consumer Decision-Making for New Products

Frontiers in Psychology, 2020

Cognitive evaluations only partially explain the consumer purchasing patterns, especially when consumers approach a product for the first time. In such an encounter, consumers anticipate the emotions they might experience as a result of their decision, as they cannot realistically evaluate product performances. The work investigates the nature and the influence of these future-oriented emotions, namely anticipated and anticipatory happiness, in the first encounter with new products. Through a first laboratory study, adopting both physiological (micro-facial expressions analysis) and self-reported measures, we confirm the distinction between anticipated and anticipatory happiness. We further show the differential impact of these two emotional constructs on the consumer decisionmaking process by grounding on the Theory of Planned Behaviour (TPB). Through a second study, based on a questionnaire, we further investigate the role of anticipated happiness within the TPB. We show that anticipated happiness is a pervasive emotional construct that influences all stages of the intention formation process. We discuss how these findings enrich existing knowledge on the interplay between cognitive and affective components of the decision-making process for new products. Moreover, we offer a methodological contribution to the use of physiological methods to assess emotions.

Consumer Happiness: Origin and Development of the Concept

Anduli

La búsqueda de la felicidad es la explicación más general del comportamiento humano. A lo largo de los años se ha intentado establecer enfoques de medición que faciliten su análisis. Un primer paso es la necesidad de entender el bienestar de las personas a través de la idea de “sentirse mejor” que ha llevado a la medición de la salud subjetiva y no sólo biológica. Este artículo pretende comprender mejor los orígenes del concepto de felicidad del consumidor, sus enfoques y las escalas de medición. Para ello, se ha aplicado una metodología basada en la revisión de la literatura más reciente, identificando los análisis más relevantes del concepto. Esta investigación muestra el creciente uso del concepto de felicidad del consumidor y la creación de diversas escalas de medición de la felicidad. A partir de estas ideas, se propone la utilización de un modelo que aproxima los tres enfoques constituyentes del concepto holístico de felicidad: una vida agradable, significativa y comprometida,...

An unbiased critique of the fluid relationship between Happiness and Advertising.

Everybody will be in consensus that, barring a few outliers, the pursuit of happiness forms an integral component of every individual’s existence. However, most of the factors which determine happiness, materialistic tendencies included, have a fuzzy, bi-directional relationship with an individual’s subjective well-being. Advertising, considered by many as one of the most explicit institutions symbolizing materialism, particularly professes an interesting area of research given the multi-layered intricacies which its relationship with consumer happiness entails. Thus, this research article posits an approximate quantitative model, based upon adequate qualitative precursors, in order to analyze and decode the finer nuances pertaining to the impact of advertising on happiness. The insights thus derived do indicate that the evolving strategy of the advertising industry, wherein an advertisement’s impact on customer happiness is gradually being accorded prime importance, is in sync with what may be derived as the quantitative pareto-optimal solution from the model.

The Meaning of Happiness in Consumer Research: Results from an Inductive Exploratory Pilot Study

2016

In this study we investigate the meaning of happiness in a consumption context. We employ an inductive approach and present the results of an exploratory pilot study with eight consumers. The study is based on a Multi-Sensory-Sculpting (MSS) procedure in which we asked consumers to build sculptures that represent consumer happiness. Following the MSS guidelines, consumers were interviewed about the meanings of their sculpture in order to elicit embodied cognition about the topic at hand. In this paper we present the meanings of consumer happiness in the participants‟ accounts and discuss implications for consumer research. Further, we discuss the applicability of the MSS-procedure to the topic of consumer happiness, and how to optimize it for later studies on consumer happiness.

The Shifting Meaning of Happiness

Social Psychological and Personality Science, 2011

From Ancient Greeks to Buddhists to modern philosophers and politicians, thinkers have queried the nature of happiness. Although scientists have investigated behavioral correlates, measures, and determinants of happiness, 1-6 little empirical work has explored the meaning of happiness. Here, we present our examination of emotions reported on 12 million personal blogs, three national surveys, and two experiments, showing that the meaning of happiness changes over the course of one's lifetime. Whereas younger people are more likely to associate happiness with excitement, older people are more likely to associate happiness with feeling peaceful. Further investigation into this shift reveals it to be driven by a redirection of attention from the future to the present as people age. Moreover, younger people can be influenced to temporarily redefine happiness as feeling peaceful (like older people) through a simple meditation that increases focus on the present moment. Finally, we show this shift in meaning of happiness to have behavioral implications, for example in how people choose to spend money. Given the energy humans invest in the pursuit of happiness, scientific inquiry is needed to understand what it is that is being pursued. With a pulse on human emotions, this investigation reveals the meaning of happiness to be dynamic, with older and younger adults pursuing different things.