Suchergebnisse

Abstract
The term "natural" is ubiquitous in advertising and branding, but limited research has investigated how consumers respond and relate to naturalness. Some researchers have documented preferences for natural products, specifically food, but there has been scant investigation of the psychological antecedents of such preferences, especially in the critical, multi-trillion-dollar domain of healthcare. Using publicly available country-level data from 41 countries and individual-level experimental and survey data from the lab and online panels, we find converging evidence that consumers do indeed differ in their preferences for relatively natural versus artificial healthcare options. These differences are influenced by the extent to which they subscribe to the Protestant Work Ethic (PWE)—a belief system that influences judgments and behaviors across diverse domains—such that people who subscribe strongly (vs. weakly) to the PWE are more likely to prefer natural healthcare options because they are more averse to external intervention in general. Further, belief in the PWE makes consumers more sensitive to the intrusiveness of an intervention than to its extent. Theoretical and substantive implications are discussed.

AbstractThe nature of a person's motivation (whether it is intrinsic or extrinsic) is a key predictor of how committed they are to a task, and hence how well they are likely to perform at it. However, it is difficult to reliably communicate and make inferences about such fine nuances regarding another person's motivation. Building on the social functional view of emotion and the evolutionary and psychophysical characteristics of facial expression of emotions, this research suggests that displayed enjoyment, as evidenced by the size and type of someone's smile, can serve as a strong nonverbal signal of intrinsic motivation. Taking the perspective of both actors and observers, five studies show that people infer greater intrinsic motivation when they see others display large Duchenne (vs. small) smiles, and that actors intuit this relationship, strategically displaying larger and more Duchenne-like smiles if they have an accessible goal to signal intrinsic (vs. extrinsic or no specific) motivation.