Is an attractive person touching an item enough to make you want to buy it?
is research examines the impact of attractiveness on consumers during a consumption experience. Specifically, it examines the effects of an attractive social influence in the context of touching and contamination of store products by investigating how consumers respond when they see attractive others touching the same products they want to purchase. In doing so, it provides the first experimental evidence of a positive contagion effect in either the marketing or the psychology literature. Across three field experiments using an actual…
1 min read
Being Prideful Makes You More Likeable
is experiment examined the ability of pride to serve as an adaptive emotion within the context of social interaction. After an in vivo induction of pride or a neutral state, participants engaged in a group problem-solving task. In contrast to a conventional view that pride is often associated with negative interpersonal outcomes, results confirmed that proud individuals not only took on a dominant role within the group problem-solving task, but also were perceived as the most likeable interaction partners. These…
1 min read
Here’s What Makes A Good Gift, According To Research
you're trying to apologize to someone, expensive gifts work: The present study examined a costly signaling model of human apology. The model assumes that an unintentional transgressor is more motivated to restore the relationship with the victim than an intentional transgressor who depreciates the relationship. The model predicts the existence of a separating equilibrium, in which only sincere apologizers will pay a certain cost to restore the relationship, while dishonest apologizers will not. Accordingly, we hypothesized that the receivers…
3 minutes
What’s worse: losing your job or being afraid of losing your job?
..perceived job insecurity ranks as one of the most important factors in employees' well-being and can be even more harmful than actual job loss with subsequent unemployment." This paper analyzes the impact of job insecurity perceptions on individual well-being. In contrast to previous studies, we explicitly take into account perceptions about both the likelihood and the potential costs of job loss and demonstrate that most contributions to the literature suffer from simultaneity bias. When accounting for simultaneity, we find the…
1 min read
Is this why we can do fun stuff for hours but work stresses us out?
ve always wondered why if something is "fun" we can do it for hours, yet if it's "work" it stresses us out and leaves us exhausted when the distinction between the two is often arbitrary and idiosyncratic. (Doing your taxes is frustrating while solving puzzles is fun. How different are they really?) Certainly, interest in the task at hand is a big factor but this study touched on an interesting element as well: This study examined pilots' vigilance during an…
3 minutes
Is There A ‘Marriage Premium’ For Gay Men?
. It is well-known that married men earn more than comparable single men, with typical estimates of the male marriage premium in the range of 10–20%. Some research also finds that cohabiting men earn more than men not living with a female partner. This study uses data from the General Social Survey and the National Health and Social Life Survey to examine whether a similar premium accrues to gay men who live with a male partner and whether cohabiting gay…
1 min read
How to quickly and easily make people like you more:
mic people: Mimicry has benefits for people in social interactions. However, evidence regarding the consequences of mimicry is incomplete. First, research on mimicry has particularly focused on effects of being mimicked. Secondly, on the side of the mimicker evidence is correlational or lacks real interaction data. The present study investigated effects for mimickers and mimickees in face-to-face interaction. Feelings towards the immediate interaction partner and the interaction in which mimicry takes place were measured after an interaction between two participants…
4 minutes
Afraid of losing your job? Then you need to be.
ing afraid of losing your job turns out to be a strong predictor of actually losing your job: This article examines whether subjective expectations of unemployment are reliable indicators of the probability of becoming unemployed and investigates their association with wage growth. We find that workers fears of unemployment are increased by their previous unemployment experience and by the unemployment experiences of a close friend, and are associated with other objective indicators of insecure jobs. We then show that unemployment…
1 min read
