Dynamic mental representations of habitual behaviours: Food choice on a web-based environment (original) (raw)
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British Journal of Social Psychology, 2008
This research examined the role of habit and intention in the prediction of future behaviour by analysing that past behaviour frequency moderates the intention-behaviour relationship to the extent that the context in which the behaviour was performed is stable. In two correlational studies, it was found that habit interacted with intention when context stability was taken into account and not when merely past behaviour frequency was considered: intentions guided future behaviour when habits were weak (low frequency or unstable context), while this was not the case when habits were strong (high frequency and stable context). A third exploratory study investigated and confirmed the idea that, if habitual goal-directed behaviour is directly activated by the context, mental accessibility of the behaviour (i.e. the ease of accessing the goal-directed behaviour in memory) moderates the intention-behaviour relation in a similar way. These findings are discussed against the background of current research on goal-directed habits and the cognitive processes underlying them.
The Consumer Contextual Decision-Making Model
Frontiers in Psychology, 2020
Consumers can have difficulty expressing their buying intentions on an explicit level. The most common explanation for this intention-action gap is that consumers have many cognitive biases that interfere with rational decision-making. The current resource-rational approach to understanding human cognition, however, suggests that brain environment interactions lead consumers to minimize the expenditure of cognitive energy according to the principle of Occam's Razor. This means that the consumer seeks as simple of a solution as possible for a problem requiring decision-making. In addition, this resourcerational approach to decision-making emphasizes the role of inductive inference and Bayesian reasoning. Together, the principle of Occam's Razor, inductive inference, and Bayesian reasoning illuminate the dynamic human-environment relationship. This paper analyzes these concepts from a contextual perspective and introduces the Consumer Contextual Decision-Making Model (CCDMM). Based on the CCDMM, two hypothetical strategies of consumer decision-making will be presented. First, the SIMilarity-Strategy (SIMS) is one in which most of a consumer's decisions in a real-life context are based on prior beliefs about the role of a commodities specific to real-life situation being encountered. Because beliefs are based on previous experiences, consumers are already aware of the most likely consequences of their actions. At the same time, they do not waste time on developing contingencies for what, based on previous experience, is unlikely to happen. Second, the What-is-Out-therein the World Strategy (WOWS) is one in which prior beliefs do not work in a real-life situation, requiring consumers to update their beliefs. The principle argument being made is that most experimental consumer research describes decisionmaking based on the WOWS, when participants cannot apply their previous knowledge and situation-based strategy to problems. The article analyzes sensory and cognitive biases described by behavioral economists from a CCDMM perspective, followed by a description and explanation of the typical intention-action gap based on the model. Prior to a section dedicated to discussion, the neuroeconomic approach will be described along with the valuation network of the brain, which has evolved to solve problems that the human has previously encountered in an information-rich environment. The principles of brain function will also be compared to CCDMM. Finally, different approaches and the future direction of consumer research from a contextual point of view will be presented.
Unconscious mental processes in consumer choice: Toward a new model of consumer behavior
is a Professor of Innovation Management at the Coles College of Business at Kennesaw State University in Atlanta, Georgia, and CEO of Sublime Behavior Marketing, a consulting and education fi rm. His book Habit: The 95 % of Behavior Marketers Ignore updates the principles of marketing in light of research from cognitive psychology and neuroscience that suggest that most of human behavior is under the sway of unconscious habits. As a speaker, trainer and consultant, Martin has been helping companies adjust their strategic marketing in the face of rapid change since 1995.
A Parsimonious Model of SKU Choice: Familiarity-based Reinforcement and Response Sensitivity
hopping experience applies to all attribute levels. The consumer is also allowed to respond dierently to a product's marketing mix activities over time. The model incorporates three key features: 1. The consumer's marginal utility from consuming an attribute level depends on her level of familiarity with it. This allows us to capture potential satiation with a familiar attribute level that has been consumed previously. 2. The consumer accumulates a shopping experience, which also depends on attributelevel familiarity. If shopping experience increases with familiarity, the consumer retrieves more familiar attribute levels more readily during shopping and chooses products based on memory cues. Both the attribute-level product satiation and shopping experience provide a natural way to model variety-seeking behavior commonly found in these product categories. Our model reveals which product attribute becomes more readily satiated and predicts that the consumer is more likely to ...
Not Just for Consumers: Context Effects Are Fundamental to Decision Making
Psychological Science, 2013
Context effects -preference changes depending on the availability of other optionshave attracted a great deal of attention among consumer researchers studying high-level decision tasks. Our experiments show that these effects also arise in simple perceptual decision-making tasks. This casts doubt on explanations limited to consumer choice and high-level decisions and indicates that context effects may be amenable to a general explanation at the level of the basic decision process. Here we demonstrate for the first time that three important context effects from the preferential choice literaturesimilarity, attraction, and compromise effects -all occur within a single perceptual decision task. Not only do our results challenge previous explanations for context effects proposed by consumer researchers, they also challenge the choice rules assumed in theories of perceptual decision-making.
Incidental exposure to hedonic and healthy food features affects food preferences one day later
Cognitive Research: Principles and Implications
Memories acquired incidentally from exposure to food information in the environment may often become active to later affect food preferences. Because conscious use of these memories is not requested or required, these incidental learning effects constitute a form of indirect memory. In an experiment using a novel food preference paradigm (n = 617), we found that brief incidental exposure to hedonic versus healthy food features indirectly affected food preferences a day later, explaining approximately 10% of the variance in preferences for tasty versus healthy foods. It follows that brief incidental exposure to food information can affect food preferences indirectly for at least a day. When hedonic and health exposure were each compared to a no-exposure baseline, a general effect of hedonic exposure emerged across individuals, whereas health exposure only affected food preferences for high-BMI individuals. This pattern suggests that focusing attention on hedonic food features engages...