Motivational Reasons For Misremembering Past Negative Events

Extended Abstract In recent years, a significant amount of research attention has been focused on documenting the relationship among experienced, predicted and remembered utilities of negative experiences. Much of this work points to discrepancies between how much an event is actually enjoyed and how much it is predicted to be enjoyed (Gilbert, Pinel, Wilson, Blumberg, & Wheatley, 1998; Redelmeier & Kahneman, 1996; Wilson, Meyers, & Gilbert, 2003). Across these papers, findings indicate that people expect future negative events to be even more negative that they actually are. Two conceptually distinct sets of mechanisms have been proposed to explain these findings. One set of theories (Trope and Liberman 2000) suggests that a perceptual mechanism underlies these findings. Specifically, these authors propose that people have a tendency to focus on the “central” aspects when events are far in the future and on more peripheral aspects when events are closer. Since a central aspect of negative events is, by definition, their negativity, these events appear more negative in the future than in real-time. The work by Gilbert et al. (1998) hints at a motivational mechanism underlying the discrepancy between actual and predicted utilities. These authors offer a “psychological immune system” perspective to suggest that once a negative event has occurred, a series of mechanisms are triggered with the objective of ameliorating the negative feelings. These mechanisms work to protect the individual from harmful effects of negative feelings. Because people do not have an intuition about the functioning of the immune system, they expect future negative events to be even more negative than they actually are. In this research, we advance the past research by examining the relationship between actual and remembered (rather than predicted) utilities of negative events. In doing so, we document the moderating role of the self-relevance of the negative event (events are high in self-relevance when they are diagnostic for assessing a relevant aspect of the self, such as one’s ability in math for a math student). Specifically, we find that past negative events portrayed as being more (vs. less) self-relevant are remembered as being Abstract The market related to so-called extreme sports, such as rock climbing and sky diving, has burgeoned since the 1990s. Consumer behavior research has linked the personality trait of sensation seeking (SS) with involvement in the above sports. However, work on participation in risky sports has not thoroughly examined the influence of personality and subsequent emotional response, on behavioral intentions in this context. The current study investigated the effects of the SS personality trait, along with demographics, on novice artificial wall climbers’ (n=241) emotional responses (PAD scale: pleasure-arousal-dominance) and related behavioral intentions to climb again. Results suggest participants’ emotions (e.g., arousal) and future intentions to climb are both a significant function of personality and gender. Abstract More and more, firms are using redemption caps as a form of promotional restriction. For example, GM ran a promotion tied in with a television show (the Apprentice) for their new vehicle, the Solstice. The offer was available for the first 1000 callers. The promotion cap was reached within hours of the show ending, yet a large number of consumers called for days after the promotion expired. In another example, a regional health club franchise ran a promotion for membership upgrade good for the first 100 responses. The promotion cap ran out on the second day, yet many members were still trying to redeem the offer weeks later. In this research, we examine how consumers process promotions that have redemption caps. Prior research on promotional restrictions has focused on concrete and well-defined time limits (e.g., Raghubir, Inman, and Grande 2004). The findings have been mixed. Some studies find that consumers perceive short promotion durations as inconvenient, thus lowering their purchase intentions (Sinha, Chandran, and Srinivasan 1999), while other studies find that shorter durations can increase purchase intentions by increasing perceptions of deal scarcity (Inman, Peter, and Raghubir 1997) or by heightening the anticipated regret associated with not acting (Inman and McAlister 1994; Simonson 1992). We propose that consumers evaluate redemption cap promotions, in part, by estimating the reach, response rate, and duration of the promotion. The reach of the promotion refers to the number of other consumers exposed to the promotion and the response rate refers to the percentage of exposed consumers who will act on the promotion. We argue that consumers’ estimates of these quantities are anchored off of the redemption cap itself. Thus, the larger the redemption capsize, the larger the estimates of reach, response rate, and duration. However, since the actual promotion duration will be negatively related to the reach and response rate of the promotion, consumers may tend to overestimate how much time they have to redeem. If this reasoning holds, we would expect that providing consumers with the actual reach of a promotion should diminish the anchoring effect. We conducted an exploratory study using a 3 x 2 between-subjects