Salient knowledge that others are also evaluating reduces judgment extremity.

As companies increasingly conduct marketing research online (e.g., through social networking sites or their brand community platforms), the knowledge that others are also filling out the same surveys becomes increasingly salient to respondents. This research examines how the salience of this knowledge influences consumer judgments. Two important characteristics of our research paradigm are especially relevant to digital contexts: (1) judgements made by the consumers are neither observable nor subject to others' disapproval; and (2) consensus is not observable or verifiable. Nevertheless, in six main studies and one auxiliary study (Web Appendix), we found that high knowledge salience of others also evaluating reduced judgment extremity. Judgment extremity is quantified by the degree or strength of an evaluation or numeric estimate about a judgment target. This effect was driven by consumers' tendency to predict a moderate consensus and to conform to this perception. Implications for marketing research and crowdsourcing are discussed. Supplementary Information: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s11747-021-00807-w.

Risky but alluring: Severe COVID-19 pandemic influence increases risk taking.

The COVID-19 pandemic has changed our lives to a profound extent. In this research, we examined how the pandemic might have influenced people's general risk attitude in their daily lives. Across four studies (two preregistered) using U.S. online worker and Canadian university student samples, we observed that individuals who were severely affected by the pandemic showed higher risk taking toward a variety of risky activities than those who were less severely affected. We attributed this effect to elevated boredom levels and increased perceived benefits from taking risks among the severely affected group and provided supporting evidence. Data ruled out risk perception, income, employment status, and response biases as alternative explanations. Our findings shed light on the psychological consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic, decision under risk, the role of perceived benefits of risk taking, and effective policy interventions. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

When does feeling of fluency matter?: how abstract and concrete thinking influence fluency effects.

It has been widely documented that fluency (ease of information processing) increases positive evaluation. We proposed and demonstrated in three studies that this was not the case when people construed objects abstractly rather than concretely. Specifically, we found that priming people to think abstractly mitigated the effect of fluency on subsequent evaluative judgments (Studies 1 and 2). However, when feelings such as fluency were understood to be signals of value, fluency increased liking in people primed to think abstractly (Study 3). These results suggest that abstract thinking helps distinguish central decision inputs from less important incidental inputs, whereas concrete thinking does not make such a distinction. Thus, abstract thinking can augment or attenuate fluency effects, depending on whether fluency is considered important or incidental information, respectively.