The Science of Consumer Psychology (2020)

We are honored to begin serving as the Editors of the Journal of Consumer Psychology. We gratefully accept this passing of the torch from the capable hands of Anirban Mukhopadhyay, Christian Wheeler, and Priya Raghubir and thank them for their committed and exceptional stewardship of the journal. We inherit this responsibility in the midst of a global pandemic that is shaking our nations to the core. This crisis raises the alarm not only of the precariousness of our social, economic, and health systems, but also of our access to science-based guidance, solutions, and leadership. As academics and scientists, we watched in distress as evidence-based science took a back seat to nescience, politics, and rhetoric. We know that societal progress is only achieved through the systematic appraisal and reappraisal of knowledge in the service of science. Indeed, many ideas that were initially resisted or even completely rejected by the scientific community were later proven to be scientific breakthroughs. We now accept as self-evident that hand washing before examining patients reduces mortality (Ignaz Semmelweis), that diseases are spread by germs (Louis Pasteur), and that the world is round (Aristotle). Scientific discoveries must be enabled by an acceptance of non-conventional thought processes alongside the traditional paradigms. In fostering the science of consumer psychology, we must be open to new schools of thought that disrupt or challenge our existing set of beliefs. Psychology involves the science of behavior, and as academics interested in consumer psychology, we are by definition interested in the science of consumer behavior. With this definition in mind, we embrace the notion of studying consumers at all touchpoints of scientific inquiry. By this, we mean that consumers can be the starting point or impetus for the investigation or they can be the unit of analysis; they can be the focal outcome or critical to the process leading up to the outcome; and the consumer’s environment can be the context or the principal element. We embrace the Journal of Consumer Psychology’s philosophy that meaningfulness resides in the pursuit of science itself and echo the outgoing editors’ sentiments that while all Journal of Consumer Psychology papers need to be relevant to consumers, not all papers need to inform managerial practice, consumer welfare, or public policy. We recognize and embrace all forms of intellectual contribution. We wish to foster a wide range of intellectual contributions by encouraging scientific inquiry across a variety of research methodologies. Studying consumers by isolating variables and constructs in controlled laboratory experiments and observing them in natural environments (i.e., field studies) has been the dominant tradition in consumer psychology. The Journal of Consumer Psychology will continue to seek manuscripts that present high-quality experimental and field analyses of consumers’ thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. However, we also recognize that there are methodologies beyond these traditional approaches that have historically had a smaller footprint in the journal, but also offer a unique understanding of these same consumer outcomes. We encourage this diversity and welcome submissions irrespective of their methodological approaches and theoretical paradigms. Our desire for a variety of theoretical domains, methodologies, and constituencies who will be informed or affected by the findings is reflected in the structure of the Journal. We will offer five distinct categories of articles. In doing so, our hope is that we can perhaps introduce some readers to theories, methods, or communities that they might not have realized have direct import to their own work. This structure frames our goal to publish contributions in conceptual thought and empirical findings that advance the body of collective wisdom on consumer psychology. We view our role as purveyors but not prognosticators of wisdom. To that end, we continue the goals set by the previous editor team to remain author-friendly and to eliminate dogmatism in the review process to ensure that great ideas and rigorous research do not fall prey to often arbitrary “rules.” Not all papers must measure mediation and then moderate it in order to show process evidence. Not all papers must use the same statistical software to test for mediation. Field studies, when appropriately conducted and relevant to the research inquiry, are fabulous. Field studies when imposed as a criterion for relevance and conducted as a “lab-study-done-on-a-random-group-of-people-outside” are less fabulous. It is our view that enforced homogeneity in the structure of papers can stifle creativity and inhibit the scientific process; dogmatic approaches will ignore possibilities that violate the norm but that move science forward in a meaningful way. We strongly believe that by embracing the multiplicity of theoretical domains and methodologies available, and by not imposing a “template style” standard to manuscripts, we will be able to broaden our understanding of the science of consumer behavior and, in turn, increase the impact of the Journal of Consumer Psychology. As a starting point, we are thrilled to publish articles in this issue that stretch our thinking about philosophy of science as we practice it, about the norms for data collection, and about our influence outside our small silo. Introducing our new Methods Dialogue section, Calder, Brendl, Tybout and Sternthal, and Schwarz exchange thoughts on designing research to exploit the power of distinguishing constructs from variables, hypotheses from predictions, and theory from effects. The use of pre-registration as a solution to the reproducibility crisis in social science is debated in the Research Dialogue between Simmons, Nelson and Simonsohn, and Pham and Oh. Our first Research Review draws on insights from consumer psychology to explain how social movements succeed in creating social change. In this Research Review, Nardini, Rank-Christman, Bublitz, Cross, and Peracchio identify the consumer psychology mechanisms that motivate collective action and encourage people to transform from bystanders to upstanders, those who provide the grassroots momentum for successful social movements. The authors illustrate their framework with examples from the growth of the Black Lives Matter movement. With this review, we also usher in JCP’s collaboration with the Society for Consumer Psychology and JCP’s publisher, Wiley, to foster and promote scholarship that advances our conversations about equity, representation, and inclusion, and welcome research conducted in these spheres. To conclude, we look forward to leading the Journal of Consumer Psychology for the next three years. We have an outstanding team of experienced, super-smart, and conscientious Associate Editors, and we thank them from the bottom of our hearts for their willingness to join us in serving the Journal of Consumer Psychology community. We have an amazing Editorial Review Board, and we thank them for their service to the journal. On behalf of the Journal of Consumer Psychology community—the editors, the reviewers, and the authors—we offer a huge thank you to Sandra Osaki, our Editorial Manager, who makes the whole enterprise run smoothly. And, we thank you, the authors, for choosing the Journal of Consumer Psychology as an outlet to get your voice heard. To all of you, we raise our glass and offer a toast: “To working with you in the service of science. Thank you.”