Lecture notes Economic and Consumer Psychology week 1-8

Economic and Consumer Psychology
Inhoudsopgave
Lecture 1 Cognitive ease and effort................................................................................................................ 2

Lecture 2 Causality and consistency................................................................................................................ 5

Lecture 3 Fallacies & heuristics....................................................................................................................... 8

Lecture 4 Expertise vs. Intuition................................................................................................................... 11

Lecture 5 Econs vs. Humans.......................................................................................................................... 14

Lecture 6 Regret and Reversals..................................................................................................................... 18

Knowledge clip Ethics – seminar 6................................................................................................................ 23

Lecture 7 The two selves.............................................................................................................................. 25

Lecture 8 Stereotypes.................................................................................................................................. 28

,Lecture 1 Cognitive ease and effort
A tale of two systems
System 1 always runs up front
- Fast (first)
System 2 monitors system 1

Dual processing models

Elaboration likelihood model
Two routes from information to attitude change
- Peripheral route (system 1)
- Central route (system 2)
Which route?

Premises of the ELM
1. People want to have correct attitudes
2. Elaboration likelihood depends on motivation and ability
3. Peripheral cues are most influential under low elaboration likelihood
4. Attitude change via the central route is more stable, stronger, and more predictive of
behavior

Motivation
- Involvement with topic (in particular material outcomes)
- Accountability/responsibility
- Need for cognition/uncertainty reduction
Ability
- Prior knowledge, expertise, intelligence (+)
- Repetition, experience (+)
- Distraction (-)
- Time pressure (-)

Peripheral cues: secondary features of the information
or context
 repetition (logo), number of arguments (many vs.
few), source credibility (attractive, famous, reliable,
expert), product origin (e.g. wine from France),
product ‘characteristics’ (‘new’, ‘improved recipe’),
format/design (well-designed advert  positive
affect)


Central cues:
 Strong arguments? Repeat a few times, make sure text is comprehensible, non-distracting
context
 Weak arguments? Offer the message only once, provide enough distraction, good
peripheral cues

Having high motivation and ability does not necessarily enhance the central cues

,Having low motivation and ability does not necessarily enhance the peripheral cues, only for
review sidedness (one-sides vs two-sided)
Two-sided reviews are considered more credible, especially for recipients with low
involvements and high expertise
 peripheral cues can be peripheral to one person and central to another

Similar but different distinctions
1. Head vs. Heart/Cognitive vs. Affect
2. Consciousness vs. Nonconscious
(Not the same as system 1 and system 2)

Heuristic systematic model

What cognitive capacity can(‘t) do
Pupils dilate when we use cognitive effort
Pupils shrink gave up or found solution (to calculation)

Capacity maxed out – the phenomenon of ego-depletion
- Self-control/willpower as a limited resource
- Strength model of self-control
Causes of ego-depletion
- Thought suppression (e.g. avoid thinking of a white bear)
- Inhibit emotional response (e.g. to a scary movie)
- Inhibit behavioral response (e.g. to someone who annoys you)
- Trying to impress others
- Making choices that involve conflict
 All involve executive functions (e.g. planning, self-monitoring, self-control, working
memory, flexibility)

The source of willpower – Glucose?
What is the limit? The role of motivation
 Willpower beliefs moderate ego depletion effects
- “After a strenuous mental activity, you feel energized for further challenging
activities”
- “After a strenuous mental activity, you feel energized for further challenging
activities”
 Reduces or reverses ego-depletion effect
Thus: different from cognitive load: being able vs. being willing
- Intelligence vs. Rationality (Stanovich)




Knowledge structure
Schema:
- Theory about how the social world
works

, - Reason why things that do not seem to have a lot in common can belong to one and
the same category

Priming and spreading of activation
- Primes can be subliminal (non-conscious) and supraliminal (conscious)

Behavioral priming
- Priming may influence behavior, but may not always change behavior
- Primes are most effective when associated with the target (behavior) or when
activating goal-congruent behavior

Brand placement - example
Implicit memory: word fragment completion test
Choice behavior: gift for participants’ time and effort (coke, dr pepper, pepsi or sprite)

Explicit memory: remember seeing [brand name] from the movie clip? (yes/no)
Explicit attitude: how much do you like [brand name]? 0 (dislike) tot 10 (like)

Cognitive ease
Mere exposure: repeated presentation of neutral stimulus lead to a more positive evaluation
-
- Ease of processing