Over the next few weeks, we will be rolling out full coverage of the ACR 2013 Doctoral Consortium which will will include full slides from presenters and topical summaries. However, we wanted to provide a few great lines either as direct quotes or paraphrases from the Doctoral Consortium. These are the ideas we found that most people were buzzing about.

The Short and Sweet Slides from the Kathleen Vohs Talk

Kathleen Vohs gave straightforward advice. Rather than give the “mile high” view (which she did a little bit) she got straight to business on what little specific things lead to success. Click here for the link to her slides. Lots of great information that will take you very little time to read.

Top Indecision Blog Tweets from Consortium

A few more that didn’t make twitter … 

@nomlogic – (paraphrased) There’s a difference between “taste” and “value” feedback. When you represent ideas to people you get “taste” feedback most often. “Taste” feedback is based on whether they like it or it fits with their preferences rather than “value” feedback which is about whether the idea is fundamentally flawed.

There’s a plethora of things to get excited about at this ACR, but here’s a few to prime your appetite for consumer science.

We asked the chairs to write about their session and explain not only the research but let us know why we should be excited and why it’s important.

If you would like to be featured as a “Session to Get Excited About” at a future conference, email us a description of your session following the examples below. (indecisionblogging@gmail.com )

 #1 Social Goals and Word of Mouth

Chair: Hillary Wiener

Details: 11am, Friday, Salon 12

Amazon reviews of everything, angry tweets seen by thousands of people, and viral ads. What do all of these things have in common?

They are all examples what marketers call “word-of-mouth,” or conversations that consumers have about products or experiences with companies.

Word-of-mouth has always been known as a powerful advertising method, but we know surprisingly little about what drives word-of-mouth and what consumers are trying to achieve by talking about products or experiences.

The first paper in this session introduces a framework for understanding word of mouth, after which three other papers show that consumers can fulfill important social goals–the need to make friends, the need to appear competent, and the need to be happy–by having conversations about products and experiences

#2 Beyond Reciprocity: Examining the Interplay Between Money & Relationships

Chairs: Avni Shah & Kathleen Vohs

Details: 3:30pm, Friday, Salon 3

If one could wish for two gifts that would substantially improve life, having money and strong close relationships would be ideal candidates.  Money and relationships, while being able to improve life’s outcomes, do so by dramatically different routes and mechanisms—and yet have significant overlap as well.  This session peers into the consequences that money and close relationships have for one another –and in doing so reveals some thought-provoking patterns for scientific understanding and consumer welfare.

This session features cutting-edge research in the psychology of money and relationships, and seeks to answer two important questions: 1) How can individuals’ close relationships influence their perceptions of and decision-making with money? 2) Conversely, how can decisions about money influence the behavior and perceptions within relationships?  This session explores two fundamental areas of research in consumer research and seeks to understand the theoretical and practical implications to aid consumer well-being.

#3 Consumers’ Prosocial Motives & Decision-Making

Chairs: Leif  Nelson and Minah Jung

Details: 8am, Friday, Salon 3

Putting this session together, I learned about what matters to people psychologically in doing something good for society and unrelated people.

The first paper by Yoeli et al. shows that social forces can be more effective than a monetary incentive in stimulating energy-conservation behavior. The second paper featuring my research, looked at how people responded to an opportunity to be generous in a transaction setting in which customers can pay any price they want and a portion of their payment goes to charity. We found that people were much less likely to engage in a pay-what-you-want transaction when any portion, large or small, went to charity. Potential customers simply opted out of the transaction.

In the third paper, Inbar et al. found that people were nice and generous often because they prefer being fair and like to balance out what they did not earn by giving it back to the world at large. The fourth paper by Barasch et al. differs from the other papers in that it looks at how observers perceive the emotional intensity of a prosocial actor. They found that people gave credit to a person who felt good after being generous to others because they perceived the positive emotion as a signal of sincerity or authenticity in charitable giving.

All these findings come with their own little complications, which we’re excited to share with you at ACR this year or one day in print.

Chair: Amy Dalton

Details: 3:30pm, Saturday, Salon 12

I was excited to organize this session because I think that these papers, collectively, have something important to contribute to both the memory literature and the social identity literature.

Memory is an important topic to explore because consumer decisions are largely memory-based. But most work takes a ‘cold cognition’ approach to studying memory and, as a consequence, little is known about social factors that are important to marketers, like social identity. The work we’re presenting tries to fill this void.

From a social identity perspective, this session is interesting because most social identity research thinks about social-identity-related consumption in terms of product/brand preferences and choice, and doesn’t think about how memory factors in.

The papers in our session will show that memory affects product preference, product disposal, and product evaluation.  Also, this relationship is bidirectional: memory affects social-identity-related behaviors, and social identities affect memory.

The last thing I’d like to mention about this session (and why I’m excited about it) is that the papers flow well together. Of course they are all about consumer memory and social identity, but each paper looks at a different aspect of memory. The result is that the session will present a nice overview to the audience about the different ways that memory can be important from a social identity perspective (i.e., social identities affect encoding, memory protection, and memory retrieval).

Some content has been edited with permission by the Indecision Blog staff. For more on each session see the ACR program here.

Two of the biggest conferences of the season for InDecision readers are coming up soon: The Association for Consumer Research (ACR) and the Society for Judgment and Making’s (SJDM). We will be live blogging and live tweeting them, as well as providing pre and post coverage of the conferences, so keep an eye out for updates and exclusives with conference researchers and speakers. In preparation for these conferences we prepared a comprehensive “Conference Survival Guide.”

Speakers: Avoid The 4 Sins of Conference Presentations

1. Saying too much
2. Showing a long and useless literature review
3. Failing to remind your audience of the designs and terms of your research
4. Showing off your methods and analysis rather than the substance of your findings (we aren’t quantitative economists after all)

Full detailed article here.

Manage Your Worries

Can’t figure out what talks to go to? Finding you are losing interest in your own topics but love that trendy talk on virtual reality or green psychology? Just generally feeling lost?

Don’t worry: our expert panel has you covered here.

Remember to Do the 4 Things We Vow to Do After Conferences (But Rarely Do)

1. Read the full program
2. Email that new contact
3. Focus on your new inspirations
4. Talk more with peers

Full article here.

How to (Not) Network

Students: remember conferences are as much about peers as they are about professors. Peers are important, as we explained a little while ago on the blog.

“Off the record” many professors have been said that they hate it when people blindly come up to them at conferences and just grill with them with questions. Of course, not everyone does this and if you come up with good questions it can certainly sometimes work, but there are many professors who hate “networking antics,” so be careful how and who you approach.

Many successful professors have also told us they spent conferences staying up late chatting research and partying with peers not professors and these academics turned out more than just fine, so if you’ve got mad networking game, then go for it. But if it’s not your style, don’t worry: it’s not the end of the world.

One additional strategy for networking is walking around with someone who actually knows people – maybe that assistant professor you get along with so well at your school could help you?

Pay Attention to Twitter

And not simply because we will be live tweeting and blogging the conferences we cover, but because other people will be too—some of which you may already know. Twitter has now reached a critical mass in Academia such that twitter has become a useful tool and a source of entertainment. Remember, you don’t need to tweet, just follow people on twitter or type in the conference hashtag to look at what’s up.

For reference check out the top tweets from the Association for Psychological Science 2013’s conference. For ACR 2013, the hashtag is:  #ACR2013 and the conference handle is @AConsRes

Go to the Big Talks

Why? Because sometimes they are always topical and good or bad, everyone will be talking about them. If you get lucky you might even get a repeat of ACR 2011 when a panelist literally turned to another panelists and said, “Maybe no cares about your type of research.”

Sometimes they can be truly fantastic and as energizing as a rock concert: we are all still tingling from Michelle Pham’s 2013 Society for Consumer Psychology lunch speech on the “7 Sins of Consumer Psychology”, which we’ve published in its entirety here. While it’s not quite the same magic as being in that electrified San Antonio room with the amazing Pham, it’s almost as good. If you don’t believe us, you can always watch this video of the speech instead:

Be A Positive Open Attendee  

According to Professor Mike Norton, a person should never respond to another’s talk by saying, “Isn’t that just cognitive dissonance?”. Instead, Norton suggests “always be trying to build on people’s ideas.” The mindset he believes you should be in is, “That’s really cool and you know what else you could do is X.” More from Mike in the video below:

Remember: Many People Want to Help You

Here, Professors Leif Nelson and Simona Botti speak about how you should just ask people and professors for help if you need it (and watch until end for funny bit).

People in the field are likely to help you because they are nice. Alessandro Peluso even has a 2013 ACR presentation that shows people enjoy giving advice, so ask away.

Remember, feel free to ask us anything at InDecision and we will hazard an answer or direct you to someone who can better answer the question. Remember, we are one big team of researchers and teamwork should be part of our daily lives.