What you buy says a lot about you, according to a new study from the June issue of the Journal of Consumer Research. Consider this goal: to spend more time with your family. If you seek out products that expand the amount of quality time you have to share – say, a football to throw around in the yard – you’re a “promotion-focused” consumer. Alternatively, if you are “prevention-focused,” you’ll seek out timesavers, like a new dishwasher, that don’t reduce the amount of time you have to spend with your family.

“We extend this line of research by identifying for the first time the cognitive process that appears to underlie these regulatory focus effects. We propose that because individuals who adopt a promotion focus concern themselves with positive outcomes, they are led to perceive the surrounding environment as safe and benign,” write Rui Zhu (University of British Columbia) and Joan Meyers-Levy (University of Minnesota).

“In contrast, individuals who adopt a prevention focus concentrate on negative outcomes, which may alert them that the environment is threatening and that specific actions are needed to ensure against negative outcomes,” they explain.

In two studies, the researchers extend understanding of these consumer impulses by examining how promotion- and prevention-focused individuals respond to advertisements. They found that individuals who adopt a promotion focus think more about the relationships among products and have an easier time connecting many disparate elements into higher level abstractions. In contrast, prevention-focused consumers respond better to unambiguous advertising, pay more attention to specific pieces of data, and are more sensitive to detail.

Rui (Juliet) Zhu and Joan Meyers-Levy, “Exploring the Cognitive Mechanism that Underlies Regulatory Focus Effects.” Journal of Consumer Research: June 2007.

Technorati Tags: Anthropology

For a decade, the legislative push for “abstinence only” sex education has suggested that non-marital sex negatively affects a teen’s mental health. But a new study shows that the negative mental side effects of a teen’s loss of virginity are confined to a small proportion of those who have sex — specifically, young girls and both boys and girls who have sex earlier than their peers and whose relationships are uncommitted and ultimately fall apart.

Using data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, Ann Meier, University of Minnesota assistant professor of sociology, studied 8,563 seventh- through 12th-graders over an 18-month period, measuring for depression and low self-esteem. Meier compared the mental health of teens who didn’t have sex to teens who were virgins at the beginning of the study, but who lost their virginity during the 18-month period.

People deal with percentages every day: the performance of a stock portfolio, a sale at the department store, or the performance of a new hybrid car, are all often expressed as percent changes. As an everyday occurrence, calculating percentages should be second nature to the average person. “Not so,” says Akshay Rao, professor of marketing at the University of Minnesota Carlson School of Management.

In the paper “When Two and Two is Not Equal to Four: Errors in Processing Multiple Percentage Changes,” Rao and Haipeng Chen, a Carlson School doctoral alum and assistant professor at the University of Miami, show that consumers treat percentages like whole numbers, and this results in systematic errors in calculation. People simply aren’t coming up with four when they add two plus two. The paper will appear in a forthcoming issue of the Journal of Consumer Research.