My research can be divided into the following few broad questions:
1) How attention influences consumer behavior
I pursue questions about how attention affects consumer decision-making, including:
a) how repeated decisions change the impact of salience on decision-making: a wealth of literature suggests salience inductions can increase the weight/importance of product attributes. With J. Wesley Hutchinson, I explore how repeated decisions following these inductions of internal salience can attenuate the salience boost to an attribute's importance. However, position effects (i.e., external salience) like being in the top of a list do not decline in magnitude over repeated decisions.
b) how ranking position affects consumer decisions: with Alixandra Barasch and Shai Davidai, I examine how people focus more on those individuals ranked above them compared to below them in ranked lists, and the aftereffects of this asymmetry.
c) how color-blocking affects consumer search: with J. Wesley Hutchinson, I test how color-blocking in retail displays facilitates consumer search for planned purchases.
2) How people evaluate their experiences
What informational inputs to people use to judgment? Across several research projects I explore this question, including:
a) accessibility and accessibility experiences--how ease of recall influences judgments: one common explanation of the availability heuristic for judgment is that people use the ease of recalling examples as an input to judgment. One paradigm that commonly tests this idea is the Schwarz et al. (1991) few-versus-many manipulation in which people either generate a few examples of something (e.g., six examples of times they were assertive) or many examples (e.g., twelve examples of times they were assertive). The difficulty of the latter task is posited to be related to reduced perceptions of assertiveness and multiple other outcomes. In a meta-analysis, J. Wesley Hutchinson and I examine how, in the ease-of-retrieval paradigm from Schwarz et al. (1991), metacognitive ease only partially explains this result.
In other work on accessibility, I meta-analyze the literature on incidental word priming on behavior with Dolores Albarracin and colleagues. With Jonah Berger I also study how accessibility affects whether people discuss topics nearby in the past or the far off in the future.
b) how people use time as an input to judgment: a stream of research argues that people exhibit duration neglect; that is, when controlling for the peak (i.e., highest moment) emotion and end (i.e., last moments) emotion, the duration of an experience has only a small, negligible impact on experiential evaluations (Fredrickson and Kahneman 1993). Kristin Diehl, Gal Zauberman, and I argue instead that the duration of an experience affects how we perceive peak and end emotion, which in turn influence experiential evaluations and therefore duration is not neglected; that is, it is considered indirectly.
c) how people integrate outcomes on multiple goals: while past work suggests people exhibit loss aversion and diminishing sensitivity on mere goals (Heath, Larrick, and Wu 1999), Sudeep Bhatia, Barbara Mellers, and I investigate how people integrate outcomes across multiple goals. We find that when facing at least one loss, people feel worse than the mere sum of how happy they would be about each goal; that is, the presence of a loss adds an additional displeasure beyond loss aversion.
d) how people use arousal as a cue for sharing: while past work suggests that people tend to share more arousing content and are more likely to share when they feel higher incidental arousal (Berger 2011; Berger and Milkman 2012), my work with Jonah Berger shows this is not the case when the content to be shared does not reflect well on the sender. This boundary suggests an account of how arousal shapes sharing that is based more on dominant-response theory: arousal will drive sharing except when people would be unlikely to share the content.
e) how people use quality as an input to choice for bad things: with Patricia A. Williams and Amit Bhattacharjee, I study how extreme badness can lead to choice.
f) how people incorporate numeric anchors: with Daniel Schley and Gizem Yalcin, I meta-analyze the anchoring-and-adjustment literature (Tversky and Kahneman 1974) to determine what theoretical accounts best explain the variation in the literature.
g) how people judge experiences compared to material possessions: with Joseph Goodman, I meta-analyze the experiential advantage literature (Van Boven and Gilovich 2003).
Published papers:
Weingarten, Evan, Sudeep Bhatia, and Barbara A. Mellers (2019), "Multiple Goals as Reference Points: One Failure Makes Everything Else Feel Worse," Management Science, 65 (7).
Weingarten, Evan and J. Wesley Hutchinson (2018), "Does Ease Mediate the Ease-of-Retrieval Effect? A Meta-Analysis," Psychological Bulletin, 144 (3), 227-283.
Weingarten, Evan and Jonah Berger (2017), "Fired Up for the Future: How Time Shapes Sharing," Journal of Consumer Research, 44 (2), 432-47.
Weingarten, Evan, Qijia Chen, Maxwell McAdams, Jessica Yi, Justin Hepler, and Dolores Albarracin (2016), "From Primed Concepts to Action: A Meta-Analysis of the Behavioral Effects of Incidentally-Presented Words," Psychological Bulletin, 142 (5), 472-497.
Hutchinson, J. Wesley, Tong Lu, and Evan Weingarten (2016), "Visual Attention in Consumer Settings," In International Handbook of Consumer Psychology, eds. Cathrine Janssen-Boyd and Magdaelna Zawisza.
Park, Gregory H., Andrew Schwartz, Maarten Sap, Margaret L. Kern, Evan Weingarten, Johannes C. Eichstaedt, Jonah Berger, David J. Stillwell, Michal Kosinski, Lyle H. Ungar, and Martin E. P. Seligman (2016), "Living in the Past, Present, and Future: Measuring Temporal Orientation with Language," Journal of Personality.
Kahn, Barbara E., Evan Weingarten, and Claudia Townsend (2013), "Assortment Variety: Too Much of a Good Thing?" In Review of Marketing Research, ed. Naresh K. Malhotra, 10, 1-23.
Working papers:
Diehl, Kristin, Evan Weingarten, and Gal Zauberman, "Duration Sensitivity of Key Moments,"
Weingarten, Evan and J. Wesley Hutchinson, "The Effects of Internal and External Salience on Product Valuations: Perception, Memory, and Temporal Dynamics,"
Weingarten, Evan and Jonah Berger, "Discussing Proximal Pasts and Far Futures,"
1) How attention influences consumer behavior
I pursue questions about how attention affects consumer decision-making, including:
a) how repeated decisions change the impact of salience on decision-making: a wealth of literature suggests salience inductions can increase the weight/importance of product attributes. With J. Wesley Hutchinson, I explore how repeated decisions following these inductions of internal salience can attenuate the salience boost to an attribute's importance. However, position effects (i.e., external salience) like being in the top of a list do not decline in magnitude over repeated decisions.
b) how ranking position affects consumer decisions: with Alixandra Barasch and Shai Davidai, I examine how people focus more on those individuals ranked above them compared to below them in ranked lists, and the aftereffects of this asymmetry.
c) how color-blocking affects consumer search: with J. Wesley Hutchinson, I test how color-blocking in retail displays facilitates consumer search for planned purchases.
2) How people evaluate their experiences
What informational inputs to people use to judgment? Across several research projects I explore this question, including:
a) accessibility and accessibility experiences--how ease of recall influences judgments: one common explanation of the availability heuristic for judgment is that people use the ease of recalling examples as an input to judgment. One paradigm that commonly tests this idea is the Schwarz et al. (1991) few-versus-many manipulation in which people either generate a few examples of something (e.g., six examples of times they were assertive) or many examples (e.g., twelve examples of times they were assertive). The difficulty of the latter task is posited to be related to reduced perceptions of assertiveness and multiple other outcomes. In a meta-analysis, J. Wesley Hutchinson and I examine how, in the ease-of-retrieval paradigm from Schwarz et al. (1991), metacognitive ease only partially explains this result.
In other work on accessibility, I meta-analyze the literature on incidental word priming on behavior with Dolores Albarracin and colleagues. With Jonah Berger I also study how accessibility affects whether people discuss topics nearby in the past or the far off in the future.
b) how people use time as an input to judgment: a stream of research argues that people exhibit duration neglect; that is, when controlling for the peak (i.e., highest moment) emotion and end (i.e., last moments) emotion, the duration of an experience has only a small, negligible impact on experiential evaluations (Fredrickson and Kahneman 1993). Kristin Diehl, Gal Zauberman, and I argue instead that the duration of an experience affects how we perceive peak and end emotion, which in turn influence experiential evaluations and therefore duration is not neglected; that is, it is considered indirectly.
c) how people integrate outcomes on multiple goals: while past work suggests people exhibit loss aversion and diminishing sensitivity on mere goals (Heath, Larrick, and Wu 1999), Sudeep Bhatia, Barbara Mellers, and I investigate how people integrate outcomes across multiple goals. We find that when facing at least one loss, people feel worse than the mere sum of how happy they would be about each goal; that is, the presence of a loss adds an additional displeasure beyond loss aversion.
d) how people use arousal as a cue for sharing: while past work suggests that people tend to share more arousing content and are more likely to share when they feel higher incidental arousal (Berger 2011; Berger and Milkman 2012), my work with Jonah Berger shows this is not the case when the content to be shared does not reflect well on the sender. This boundary suggests an account of how arousal shapes sharing that is based more on dominant-response theory: arousal will drive sharing except when people would be unlikely to share the content.
e) how people use quality as an input to choice for bad things: with Patricia A. Williams and Amit Bhattacharjee, I study how extreme badness can lead to choice.
f) how people incorporate numeric anchors: with Daniel Schley and Gizem Yalcin, I meta-analyze the anchoring-and-adjustment literature (Tversky and Kahneman 1974) to determine what theoretical accounts best explain the variation in the literature.
g) how people judge experiences compared to material possessions: with Joseph Goodman, I meta-analyze the experiential advantage literature (Van Boven and Gilovich 2003).
Published papers:
Weingarten, Evan, Sudeep Bhatia, and Barbara A. Mellers (2019), "Multiple Goals as Reference Points: One Failure Makes Everything Else Feel Worse," Management Science, 65 (7).
Weingarten, Evan and J. Wesley Hutchinson (2018), "Does Ease Mediate the Ease-of-Retrieval Effect? A Meta-Analysis," Psychological Bulletin, 144 (3), 227-283.
Weingarten, Evan and Jonah Berger (2017), "Fired Up for the Future: How Time Shapes Sharing," Journal of Consumer Research, 44 (2), 432-47.
Weingarten, Evan, Qijia Chen, Maxwell McAdams, Jessica Yi, Justin Hepler, and Dolores Albarracin (2016), "From Primed Concepts to Action: A Meta-Analysis of the Behavioral Effects of Incidentally-Presented Words," Psychological Bulletin, 142 (5), 472-497.
Hutchinson, J. Wesley, Tong Lu, and Evan Weingarten (2016), "Visual Attention in Consumer Settings," In International Handbook of Consumer Psychology, eds. Cathrine Janssen-Boyd and Magdaelna Zawisza.
Park, Gregory H., Andrew Schwartz, Maarten Sap, Margaret L. Kern, Evan Weingarten, Johannes C. Eichstaedt, Jonah Berger, David J. Stillwell, Michal Kosinski, Lyle H. Ungar, and Martin E. P. Seligman (2016), "Living in the Past, Present, and Future: Measuring Temporal Orientation with Language," Journal of Personality.
Kahn, Barbara E., Evan Weingarten, and Claudia Townsend (2013), "Assortment Variety: Too Much of a Good Thing?" In Review of Marketing Research, ed. Naresh K. Malhotra, 10, 1-23.
Working papers:
Diehl, Kristin, Evan Weingarten, and Gal Zauberman, "Duration Sensitivity of Key Moments,"
Weingarten, Evan and J. Wesley Hutchinson, "The Effects of Internal and External Salience on Product Valuations: Perception, Memory, and Temporal Dynamics,"
Weingarten, Evan and Jonah Berger, "Discussing Proximal Pasts and Far Futures,"
