Economics Insights @ CBS

Travis Proulx and Michael Inzlicht offer an intriguing and ambitious model that seeks to parsimoniously capture the full range of meaning threats and the many psychological mechanisms that people use to cope with those threats. In this commentary, we articulate both our agreements and our disagreements with their meaning maintenance model (MMM). In general, we find the model both compelling and intriguing, and we find promise in several of its core assertions. However, we believe the current model, like any incipient model, has yet to incorporate some critical core constructs.

What is business anthropology and what should it be in the future? My reflections are based upon my reading of others’ work and my own experience as an observant participant in marketing research and advertising. My current practice is that of a Principal at a marketing research firm, with which I have been affiliated since 2006. For 25 years prior, I was an advertising executive, working in the areas of account management and account planning.

Four experiments examined the effects of perspective taking on processes contributing to stereotype maintenance: biases in social memory, behavior explanations, and information seeking. The first two experiments explored whether perspective taking influences memory and spontaneous explanations for stereotype-relevant behaviors. Relative to participants in an objective-focus condition, perspective takers exhibited better recall of stereotype-inconsistent behaviors (Experiment 1) and spontaneously generated more dispositional explanations for them (Experiment 2).

The current paper reviews the concept of power and offers a new architecture for understanding how power guides and shapes consumer behavior. Specifically, we propose that having and lacking power respectively foster agentic and communal orientations that have a transformative impact on perception, cognition, and behavior. These orientations shape both who and what consumers value. New empirical evidence is presented that synthesizes these findings into a parsimonious account of how power alters consumer behavior as a function of both product attributes and recipients.