ESSAYS EXAMINING ROLE- BASED BEHAVIORS
- Project Research
- 1-5 Chapters
- Abstract : Available
- Table of Content: Available
- Reference Style: APA
- Recommended for : Student Researchers
- NGN 3000
ABSTRACT
My research examines role-based behavior in consumption contexts, with a particular focus on integrating contemporary social-role and identity theories with other, seemingly disparate theories like tokenism and mental accounting. My two essays are linked by the idea that “who we are” in terms of our social roles and identities affects judgments, attitudes, and evaluations of consumption choices in a wide array of previously unexamined contexts. My research shows that people often end up drawing on their social identity and roles, deliberately or not, in their response to the outside world. Furthermore, I show that this tendency has important consequences for marketers and consumers alike. The specifics are as follows. Essay 1 of my study examines how the extent to which an individual’s life roles (e.g., “employee” and “wife”) are integrated (i.e., the extent to which the psychological barriers between two or more life-roles are permeable and frequently traversed) moderates the fungibility of mentally-allocated funds. Specifically, I find that the more integrated two life roles are, the greater the cross-account fungibility of resources allocated to mental accounts corresponding with those roles (i.e., role-aligned accounts). Accordingly, individuals with more integrated roles are (i) more able to circumvent the constraints typically imposed by mental accounts and (ii) more likely to utilize resources from a mental account corresponding with one role to service the needs/wants of the other role. I obtain evidence that this effect arises because more integrated (vs. segmented) roles beget a higher degree of perceived psychological connectedness—the extent to which the individual feels two roles share defining psychological features. Perceptions of psychological connectedness allow for costs incurred in one role to be offset by benefits gained in another, because the roles share psychological properties like beliefs, values, ideals, x and goals. In contrast, I find no evidence that people with more integrated roles construct or maintain role-aligned mental accounts differently than people with more segmented roles. Essay 2 of my dissertation examines how being a token (often the lone representative of one’s social category) in a transient social group can influence private evaluations of identitylinked products. Five studies find that being an incidental token member in a transient group lowers private evaluations of products that typify the negative stereotypes of the tokenized identity. I argue that incidental tokenism activates negative stereotypes associated with the tokenized identity, which subsequently leads to a desire to disassociate specifically from identity-linked products that typify those stereotypes (as opposed to all identity-linked products in general). Consistent with this theorizing, similar results emerge when negative stereotypes are activated directly, and the effect is attenuated when tokenized individuals are self-affirmed. These results demonstrate the largely unexamined consequences of being a token group member on private evaluations (vs. public behavior) in subjective, preference-based (vs. objective, performance-based) domains. In addition to contributing to the broad literature on identity-based consumption, my dissertation essays take a more granular approach. Together, the two essays reveal that the influence of our roles and identities on our consumption choices is much more nuanced than previously thought.
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