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Summary Slides Consumer and Economic Psychology
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Consumer and Economic Psychology is a course that is given in the 3rd year of the bachelor Psychology, or in the minor Psychology in Society
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Femke van RijnJanuary 2020
Consumer and Economic Psychology
Lecture 1
Early consumer psychology emerged from interest in advertising.
- Industrial revolution: more fabrics, more products, need for advertising
- Mid 1800’s: establishment of advertising industry in the US
Two schools of thought:
- Consumers are rational decision makers
o If you’ll tell them about products, they’ll make the best choice
- Consumers are irrational
The rational consumer:
- Consumers will pay careful attention to promotional messages before making product
choices
- The job of advertising is to inform consumers about what products are available
- Consumers are skeptical and will make the best decision for them regardless of how the
product is marketed
- Aligns with classic economic theory: people are self-interested and make rational decisions
to maximize their own gain
o Economy is self-regulating, the invisible hand
- Early theories and research on advertising focused on attracting and retaining the
consumer’s attention
o Assumption that they make the best choice, and the job of advertising is to make
them aware of your product
- Method:
o Mentalistic/introspection: thinking about what might work
o Self-report: asking people what attracts their attention
The non-rational consumer:
- Consumers can be manipulated and persuaded to buy things
- They do not always make the best economic decisions
- Aligns with psychology and the study of emotion, motivation and reinforcement
(behaviorism)
- Research should focus on whether consumers actually purchase the product, not whether
the advertisement attracted their attention
o People may notice ads but still not buy the product
- Which stimuli, conditions and strategies lead to people buying products? And how do
outcomes of purchases affect whether they’ll buy again?
- Antecedent (seeing the ad) -> behavior (buying) -> consequence (likely to buy again)
- Method: observing behavior
o Experimental
o Observational
1
,1959: Division of Consumer Psychology within the American Psychological Association established
- Journal of Consumer Psychology
Pham – The Seven Sins of Consumer Psychology
- Critique of current consumer psychology and a summary of what is going well and what
needs more focus
- The scope of consumer behavior:
o Consumer experience starts with a desire (wanting a product), the acquisition of it,
the use/consumption and the disposal.
o Pham would like to see more research on the other many ways to require products
besides buying (sharing/renting/gifting/stealing), how marketers manufacture needs
out of thin air, how people actually use the products, the effects of overconsumption
and recycling, hoarding and circular economies
-
2
, o Consumer Behavior Theory: an eye with different lenses
Mechanical core -> affective layer -> motivational ground -> social and
relational context -> cultural background
The inner 3 are individual
But we shouldn’t have individual theories, explain with multiple theories
- Consumer psychology has ben dominated by two research paths:
o Deductive/theory driven/top-down: starting with a theory and then gathering data
to test the theory, most dominant but not always realistic
o Inductive/data driven/bottom-up: starting with an interesting
phenomenon/observation and studying it in order to derive a theory, might result in
research that is more directly relevant to consumer behavior
- Pham argues for two more research paths:
o The descriptive path
Simply describing what consumers do, often through observation
No intention of making a theory
Can reveal what people need and how they react to products
Can be helpful in designing products that are easier to use
Early observational research meant watching consumers in their natural
environment and recording what they do
Quantitative (counting)
Qualitative (describing how they interact)
Ethical implications of the observational method: almost every purchase we
make is recorded digitally, the scope for analyzing consumer data is almost
limitless
o The field-theory validation path
Researchers usually test their own theories, but may not be good at
identifying what is important
People working in the industry know what’s important and can generate
naïve theories, but do not have the skills to tests them
Use the expertise of researchers to test theories that the marketing industry
came up with
- Two more problems:
o Overgeneralization of results = once a result has been published, it is accepted as a
fact and we tend to overstate its replicability and generalizability
We need more replication of results under different conditions to ensure
they are robust and generalizable
The specific conditions in a study might have made it work, and people tend
to overgeneralize it to other conditions
o Convenient research = we focus on samples that are convenient, but not
representative
Using American University students or MTurk
Also a reliance on convenient methods, like imagining scenarios or self-
report research, but they might not tell us about what people would do in
the real situation
3
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