Rotman Management — Spring 2017

120 / Rotman Management Spring 2017

James R. Bettman is the Burlington Industries Professor of Business

Administration, a member of the Marketing area at the Fuqua School of

Business and Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience at Duke

University. Most of his papers can be downloaded online.

but is not a big deal for something where the normal wait

time is twelve weeks.

Recently, you’ve been studying ‘pro-social consumption’.

How do you define it?

In the past couple of decades, researchers have started to

look beyond how this research can help marketers — to con-

sider how consumer research can help people lead better,

healthier lives. I would define pro-social consumption as

consumption based on the notion that ‘buying or consum-

ing this product will have positive consequences for others’.

That can range from making a donation to a cause to buying

an environmentally-friendly product.

My colleagues and I have looked at the effects of dif-

ferent forms of positive emotions on pro-social behaviours.

Most academics study negative emotions because they are

more differentiated. Anger is clearly quite different from

fear, which is clearly different from sadness, and so on; on

the other hand, positive emotions tend to get bunched to-

gether, but we felt that distinct positive emotions could also

be differentiated and that they might affect behaviour in dif-

ferent ways.

We looked at how the presence of emotions like love,

hope, pride and compassion in messaging are related to

things like donating to a charity. We had a theory, namely

that the important way in which these emotions differ is the

degree to which they relate to how closely you connect with

others. Love, for example, is all about connection; while pride

is more about ‘me’ and how I am separated from others.

We found that, if you ask people whether they want to

help someone who is located close to them (for instance,

someone who lives in their city), most people say Yes. And,

if you make the person feel good about themselves, they are

even more likely to say Yes. It’s when you ask them to help

with a cause that is not physically close to them that the posi-

tive emotion you choose to invoke makes a difference.

For instance, we found that love is much more effective

at getting people to donate to causes that are more psycho-

logically distant. You can imagine either a love-focused ad

(i.e. showing a father hugging his child) or a pride-focused

ad (‘Think of how proud you’ll be to have made a differ-

ence’); we found that the latter actually makes people less

likely to want to donate to distant causes.

To me, the most fascinating aspect of human decision-

making behaviour is the flexibility and dynamism with

which people respond to a wide variety of different environ-

mental conditions. Even very minor changes in a decision

environment can affect people’s choices. The issue is, if our

preferences are affected by subtle changes in the presenta-

tion of information, decision makers become vulnerable to

‘strategic manipulation’ — and they should always be aware

of that.

Academics have started to consider how their research

can help consumers lead better, healthier lives.