Research Design Connection: Thinking About Disease and Making Decisions

Huang and Sengupta studied how thinking about disease influences decisions made. They investigated “how exposure to disease-related cues influences consumers’ preference for typical (vs. atypical) product options…we predict that disease salience decreases relative preference for typical versus atypical options, because typical products are implicitly associated with many people, misaligning them with the people-avoidance motive triggered by disease cues…we argue that the focal effect will not manifest when the disease in question is explicitly described to be non-contagious, or when an anti-infection intervention is introduced, or when the decision context involves minimum infection.” Yunhui Huang and Jaideep Sengupta. “The influence of Disease Cues on Preference for Typical Versus Atypical Products.” Journal of Consumer Research, in press, https://doi.org/10.1093/jcr/ucaa029 Sally Augustin, PhD, a cognitive scientist, is the editor of Research Design Connections (www.researchdesignconnections.com), a monthly subscription newsletter and free daily blog, where recent and classic research in the social, design, and physical sciences that …