THE MERE SHARING EFFECT.
The rapid spread of online misinformation creates serious risks for consumers, brands, and society at large. While prior research has examined why consumers share such content, little is known about how sharing shapes the sharer’s own perceptions. Across four experiments, we document a Mere Sharing Effect: Sharing an ambiguous headline or product claim inflates subsequent truth judgments. The effect is attenuated when individuals lack agency over what to share, consistent with a self-perception account. It persists under both named and anonymous sharing, as well as when sharing is intended but disrupted, ruling out a self-presentation account. Finally, the effect disappears when consumers deliberately share misinformation to warn others on a watchdog platform. These findings advance understanding of consumers’ susceptibility to brand rumors and misinformation.
CORPORATE LOBBYING.
Corporate lobbying is known to yield substantial financial returns, yet emerging evidence suggests it can also harm customer satisfaction—a tension not yet explored from the consumer’s perspective. In this project, we examine how knowledge of a firm’s lobbying expenditures shapes consumer perceptions. Across five studies, we find that consumers view firms engaged in lobbying as producing lower-quality products and having less satisfied customers. These effects persist regardless of political ideology or free-market support, suggesting that skepticism toward lobbying is widespread and deeply rooted. We continue to investigate the psychological mechanisms underlying these judgments and explore interventions informed by our findings, contributing to a broader understanding of how institutional behaviors shape brand perceptions.
PANEL CONFIDENTIAL.
In this companion manuscript to Krefeld-Schwalb, Sugerman, and Johnson (2024), I draw on my professional experience in online sampling at Qualtrics to highlight underappreciated features of online data collection and offer practical guidance (e.g., on how to select a panel and how to write effective screening questions).
DRAG-AND-DROP PROCESS TRACING.
In this project, we introduce Drag-and-Drop Rank Order Process Tracing (DROPT): A novel theory of ranking behavior (e.g., which items are moved first, dragged furthest, and touched most frequently) and a public JavaScript package that enables other researchers to implement it. With respect to attribute substitution, we find that when participants rely on a particular attribute, they tend to drag items with higher values of the attribute more (drag count), earlier (drag order) and further towards the top (drag distance).
PERCEPTIONS OF CLIMATE POLICY.
Do citizens know which government actions are most effective at reducing carbon emissions? We find that German citizens’ ability to accurately judge the effectiveness of such policies is quite limited, and that their judgments are systematically biased by factors unrelated to actual effectiveness. For example, policy endorsement is inversely related to actual effectiveness, yet positively related to perceived effectiveness. This pattern is consistent with an attribute substitution account: Facing the complex question of policy effectiveness, citizens instead answer an easier, more accessible question, like how much they endorse or stand to benefit from the new regulation. As a result, citizens often misjudge which policies would most reduce emissions, limiting their ability to align their political support with sustainability intentions, and highlighting the everyday consequences of low carbon competence.
A preprint of this manuscript is available here.
In a large and ongoing multi-national extension of this work, we examine citizens’ perceptions of climate policy effectiveness across the United States, Germany, the United Kingdom, France, Australia, and India.