Researchers and practitioners alike frequently survey consumers to gain insights into their attitudes, preferences, and beliefs. The authors propose a potentially pervasive, but as of yet unidentified, source of bias in survey responding. Specifically, they propose that respondents' answers to questions might sometimes reflect attitudes that respondents want to convey but that the researcher has not asked about, a phenomenon termed 'response substitution.' The authors examine this proposition in a series of three experiments that demonstrate the phenomenon, provide support for the process account, and identify boundary conditions. They also discuss general theoretical, methodological, and practical implications as well as specific implications for research on attitudes and contingent valuation.

A seminal case study by Festinger found, paradoxically, that evidence that disconfirmed religious beliefs increased individuals’ tendency to proselytize to others. Although this finding is renowned, surprisingly, it has never been subjected to experimental scrutiny and is open to multiple interpretations. We examined a general form of the question first posed by Festinger, namely, how does shaken confidence influence advocacy? Across three experiments, people whose confidence in closely held beliefs was undermined engaged in more advocacy of their beliefs (as measured by both advocacy effort and intention to advocate) than did people whose confidence was not undermined. The effect was attenuated when individuals affirmed their beliefs, and was moderated by both importance of the belief and open-mindedness of a message recipient. These findings not only have implications for the results of Festinger’s seminal study, but also offer new insights into people’s motives for advocating their beliefs.

Everyday items are imbued with subtle yet pervasive gender associations. For instance, sour dairy products and products with rounded edges tend to be perceived as relatively feminine, whereas meat and products with sharp edges tend to be perceived as relatively masculine. In a series of studies, we find that men are more likely to choose gender-congruent options (masculine foods and angular-shaped items) when they have unconstrained time and attentional resources than when these resources are constrained. In contrast, women’s choices tend to not be affected by time or attentional resource availability. Our findings suggest that men experience a conflict between their relatively intrinsic preferences and gender norms and that they tend to forgo their intrinsic preferences to conform to a masculine gender identity (when they have sufficient resources to incorporate gender norm information in their choices). Women, on the other hand, appear to be less concerned with making gender-congruent choices.

The principle of loss aversion is thought to explain a wide range of anomalous phenomena involving tradeoffs between losses and gains. In this article, I show that the anomalies loss aversion was introduced to explain - the risky bet premium, the endowment effect, and the status quo bias - are characterized not only by a loss/gain tradeoff, but by a tradeoff between the status quo and change; and, that a propensity towards the status quo in the latter tradeoff is sufficient to explain these phenomena. Moreover, I show that two basic psychological principles - (1) that motives drive behavior; and (2) that preferences tend to be fuzzy and ill-defined - imply the existence of a robust and fundamental propensity of this sort. Thus, a loss aversion principle is rendered superfluous to an account of the phenomena it was introduced to explain.