Pursuing affiliation through consumption.

One core fundamental need that people may try to address through consumption is that of affiliation, or the need to belong. First, giving gifts may serve that goal, but it may also potentially hurt the formation of affiliative bonds if it creates a sense of indebtedness. Second, experiential consumption serves the need to belong if it is enjoyed socially. Third, symbolic consumption may help craft a prosocial image, but may also hinder it if one engages in conspicuous consumption to demonstrate one's wealth. Finally, consumption of media that allows the formation of parasocial relations with influencers and celebrities, and presence and activity in online communities can act as a surrogate for offline satisfaction of the need to belong.

Does a single consumption imagery event increase food desire?

Food desire is an intense motivational state a consumer experiences toward food that accounts for much of consumption. While extant research has shown that experiencing desire elicits consumption imagery, it remains unclear whether consumption imagery alone instigates desire. Even though this directional relationship has been often speculated upon, little empirical study has considered it. This paper empirically identifies imagined consumption as an antecedent of food desire. Six studies show that consumption imagery increases food desire and suggest that this impact is due to induced feelings of deprivation. Our findings also show that increased desire explains previously researched outcomes of imagery, such as a higher willingness to pay for and consumption volumes of the imagined food.

Cross-national investigation of the drivers of obesity: Re-assessment of past findings and avenues for the future.

In this paper we question whether prior cross-national differences in food attitudes still exist and if so, to what extent. Due to societal evolutions such as sedentarism and globalization, international variations in food attitudes may not be as pronounced as currently believed. A cross-sectional web-based survey was carried out in the United States, the United Kingdom, France and Belgium. A total of 2167 respondents (52% women; mean age = 39.0 years, SD = 11.4) participated. To successfully combat obesity, a joint approach focusing on food choice and physical activity is required; therefore we included behavioral measures by means of choice tasks for these two important drivers. Further, the extent to which respondents subscribe to the unhealthy = tasty intuition, together with health and taste interest were investigated. Socio-demographic information and self-reported heights and weights were also incorporated. Logistic regressions were fitted with weight status as the dependent variable and the attitudinal and behavioral measures as independent variables. Our findings indicate that having a higher interest in healthy eating decreases the chance of being overweight (odds = 0.88) and believing that unhealthy food is tasty significantly increases the chance of being obese by 1.18 times. Overall, we find that food attitudes have largely converged across the countries we investigated.

Players' expertise and competition with others shape the satisfaction of competence needs, gaming gratifications, and contingent self-esteem in a gaming context.

The current study explores how competition and gaming expertise affect the satisfaction of competence needs and gaming gratifications. We demonstrate that competition moderates the effect of gaming expertise on the satisfaction of competence needs, which in turn affects game enjoyment and replay intention. Gaming expertise predicted players' need satisfaction, game enjoyment, and replay intention significantly better in a competitive compared to a noncompetitive context. The effect of gaming expertise on game enjoyment and replay intention was, furthermore, mediated by the satisfaction of competence needs. Finally, gaming expertise positively affected the importance of competition for players' self-esteem only in the competitive gaming context. The present findings demonstrate the importance of competition and gaming expertise for the satisfaction of competence needs, gaming gratifications, and the pursuit of self-esteem during gameplay, attesting to the applicability of self-determination theory to gaming contexts.

The hubris hypothesis: you can self-enhance, but you'd better not show it.

We tested whether and why observers dislike individuals who convey self-superiority through blatant social comparison (the hubris hypothesis). Participants read self-superiority claims ("I am better than others"; Experiments 1-7), noncomparative positive claims ("I am good"; Experiments 1-2, 4), self-equality claims ("I am as good as others"; Experiments 3-4, 6), temporally comparative self-superiority claims ("I am better than I used to be"; Experiment 5), other-superiority claims ("S/he is better than others"; Experiment 6), and self-superiority claims accompanied by persistent disclaimers (Experiment 7). They judged the claim and the claimant (Experiments 1-7) and made inferences about the claimant's self-view and view of others (Experiments 4-7) as well as the claimant's probable view of them (Experiment 7). Self-superiority claims elicited unfavorable evaluations relative to all other claims. Evaluation unfavorability was accounted for by the perception that the claimant implied a negative view of others (Experiments 4-6) and particularly of the observer (Experiment 7). Supporting the hubris hypothesis, participants disliked individuals who communicated self-superiority beliefs in an explicitly comparative manner. Self-superiority beliefs may provoke undesirable interpersonal consequences when they are explicitly communicated to others but not when they are disguised as noncomparative positive self-claims or self-improvement claims.

Hungry for money: the desire for caloric resources increases the desire for financial resources and vice versa.

This report attempts to provide an evolutionary explanation for humans' motivation to strive for money in present-day societies. We propose that people's desire for money is a modern derivate of their desire for food. In three studies, we show the reciprocal association between the incentive value of food and of money. In Study 1, hungry participants were less likely than satiated participants to donate to charity. In Study 2, participants in a room with an olfactory food cue, known to increase the desire to eat, offered less money in a give-some game compared with participants in a room free of scent. In Study 3, participants' desire for money affected the amount of M&M's they ate in a subsequent taste test, but only among participants who were not restricting their food intake in order to manage their weight.

The effect of category focus at encoding on category frequency estimation strategies.

We investigated whether category focus at encoding affects how people estimate category frequencies. Participants in three experiments viewed items of various categories. They estimated category frequencies after categorizing them into relevant versus irrelevant categories (Experiments 1-2) or after categorizing versus memorizing them (Experiment 3). Verbal protocols (Experiments 2A and 2B), response latencies (Experiments 2A and 2B), frequency estimate changes (Experiment 2B), and the relationships between objective and estimated category frequencies and instance recall (Experiments 1-3) showed that the participants mainly used availability to estimate category frequencies after memorizing instances (Experiment 3) or after categorizing them into irrelevant categories (Experiments 1-2). After categorizing items into relevant categories, the participants relied more often on stored category frequency information (Experiments 1-3).

The impact of need for closure on conservative beliefs and racism: differential mediation by authoritarian submission and authoritarian dominance.

The present study explores the influence of need for closure as well as authoritarian submission (Right-Wing Authoritarianism [RWA]) and authoritarian dominance (Social Dominance Orientation [SDO]) on the genesis of conservative beliefs and racism. For this purpose, two structural equation models were compared. In Model 1, RWA and SDO were entered as independent variables and the need for closure facets Decisiveness and Need for Simple Structure acted as mediator variables. In Model 2, the need for closure facets served as independent variables and RWA and SDO acted as mediators. In two student samples (Sample 1, N = 399, Sample 2, N = 330) and one adult sample (Sample 3, N = 379), Model 2 showed superior fit to the data. These results corroborate the hypothesis that authoritarianism should be interpreted in terms of generalized beliefs rather than in terms of personality characteristics. In addition, analyses show that the effects of Need for Simple Structure on conservative beliefs and racism are fully mediated by RWA but only partly by SDO. These results suggest a differential genesis of RWA and SDO.

On the replicability of the affective priming effect in the pronunciation task.

Bargh, Chaiken, Raymond, and Hymes (1996) and Hermans, De Houwer, and Eelen (1994) showed that a valenced target word is pronounced faster after the presentation of an affectively related prime word than after the presentation of an affectively unrelated prime word. This finding is important because it provides crucial evidence for the hypotheses that stimulus evaluation (a) is goal-independent and (b) facilitates the encoding of stimuli that have the same valence. However, recent studies indicate that the affective priming effect is not a reliable finding in the standard pronunciation task. We report the results of a nearly exact replication of Bargh et al.'s (1996) Experiment 2. In line with previous replication studies, we failed to detect the affective priming effect.