Thomas Kramer

When Inflicting Pain on Others Pays Off

ilseu — Fri, 21 Jun 2024 20:03:28 +0000

When Inflicting Pain on Others Pays Off ilseu Fri, 06/21/2024 - 13:03 More News David Danelski (david.danelski@ucr.edu) | UCR News) June 20, 2024

Oh, the joy of inflicting pain upon others. The Germans have a word for it: Schadenfreude, meaning “malicious pleasure.” And tapping into its sentiment properly can, ironically, do a lot of good by raising money for charity.

Professor of Marketing Thomas Kramer

In a groundbreaking paper published in the Journal of Consumer Psychology, UC Riverside School of Business marketing professor and associate dean Thomas Kramer and co-authors articulate and quantify the appeal of Schadenfreude (pronounced Sha-den-froid-e) through the lens of marketing psychology.

Through a series of behavioral scenario studies, their paper provides insights for the highly competitive charitable fundraising industry, which gathers some $485 billion in the United States annually.

Firstly, those organizing fundraisers appealing to Schadenfreude shouldn’t get too carried away. Schadenfreude is about inflicting mild misfortune that falls comfortably short of sadism on those seen as deserving of the misfortune. We’re talking about pies thrown into faces and plunges into water tanks – not anything too painful or damaging.

In fact, when participants of Kramer’s studies imagined celebrities they disliked getting shocked with a taser gun, the fundraising potential wasn’t as strong as seeing the same celebrities receive the milder misfortune of getting drenched with a bucket of ice water.

“If a disliked person gets more than their just desserts, and they’re severely punished, you no longer feel happy about that punishment, and donations go down,” explained Kramer, who applies his expertise in behavioral psychology to marketing science.

Former BET executive Stephen Hill sits above a dunk tank for a fundraiser. (Photo by Larry Busacca/Getty Images for City of Hope)

Kramer’s other key findings include:

• To maximize donations, the donor can inflict or observe the mild misfortune, and those who inflict donate roughly the same as those who watch.

• The donors also must have disdain for the person receiving the misfortune, which elicits pleasure when they see that person get their punishment.

The study was conducted by having hundreds of participants at the University of Florida and those recruited through a crowdsourcing service called Amazon Mechanical Turk imagine various Schadenfreude scenarios.

In one example, they rated levels of dislike and deservingness of the person receiving the misfortune and how much they would donate (between zero and $10) to throw a pie into that person’s face. Higher levels of deservingness resulted in higher payments. In another scenario, more mild misfortune paid better than severe misfortune..

The paper’s title is “The Ironic Impact of Schadenfreude: When the Joy of Inflicting Pain Leads to Increased Prosocial Behavior.” Its co-authors are Yael Zemack-Rugar of University of Central Florida, Orlando, and Laura Boman of Kennesaw State University, Georgia.

Tags

Research News

UCR News

Thomas Kramer

Marketing

Consumers Tend to Overuse Shared Products

ilseu — Thu, 29 Jun 2023 01:26:32 +0000

Consumers Tend to Overuse Shared Products ilseu Wed, 06/28/2023 - 18:26 More News David Danelski (david.danelski@ucr.edu) | UCR News June 28, 2023

As consumers, we are becoming more communal. Among other products we now share with strangers are shampoo and body wash in containers affixed to hotel suite showers as well as hand sanitizers in public dispensers at gyms, campuses, libraries, and other facilities.

Thomas Kramer, associate dean for the undergraduate business programs and professor of marketing

The benefits are several: hotels save on toiletry costs, plastic waste is reduced, and we lower our risk of contracting infectious diseases.

Yet, such sharing appears to also result in some unexpected waste, according to a paper published in the Journal of Marketing Research that is co-authored by Thomas Kramer, a professor of marketing at the University of California, Riverside.

Kramer and his co-authors examined a suite of studies that probed the behaviors and attitudes of people when they shared hotel toiletries, hand sanitizers, and plant food used by college students, among other products.

The bottom line?

“Most of the studies show that people believe the product is less efficacious, meaning it doesn't work as well, when they share it with strangers rather than friends,” Kramer said. “Then, in some studies, it shows that it actually leads to them using more to make up for that perceived low efficacy.”

The research also identified ways to reduce overuse.

“One way to reduce wasteful use is by making consumers think they're not sharing with strangers, but instead sharing with family or friends,” said Kramer, who is also an associate dean of undergraduate programs for UCR’s School of Business. “The second way is by increasing a person’s identification with the product, even when it is shared out.”

A good example, he said, is the shared hand sanitizer stations on the UCR campus. At these stations, refillable bottles of sanitizer and liquid soap have labels with the UCR logo.

“The UCR logo makes me identify with the hand sanitizer,” Kramer said. “So, I no longer feel that it's sharing with strangers because of my identification with UCR, and it will stop me from using too much.”

The plant food study illustrated this phenomenon. College students were tasked with an experiment that included fertilizing plants with a shared container fertilizer. When college students did the experiment individually, they used less than the recommended amount of fertilizer. But when they worked in teams with students they didn’t know, they used more.

The presence of the University of California, Riverside, logo, as in this soap dispenser, make people believe the product is more effective, researchers found (UCR photo)

Kramer finds these results fascinating because behaviors that make no practical sense (using too much shampoo won’t make your hair cleaner, for instance) have major implications for business and program managers in terms of costs and consumer satisfaction.

“It doesn't make sense, but it happens,” Kramer said. “It shouldn't matter, but it does matter.”

Sharing products with strangers may go back to the first set of salt and pepper shakers left on a restaurant table for the next customer, but it is a trend now on the rise. The COVID19 pandemic made shared hand sanitizers ubiquitous. Starting this year, California banned single-use toiletries in plastic containers and similar bans are proposed in New York and Hawaii. Additionally, nonprofit organizations are teaming up with Coppertone to provide shared sunscreen dispensers at beaches, parks, and public swimming pools to reduce skin cancer risk.

“It a trend that’s going to keep growing because of our sustainability and health concerns,” Kramer said.

The paper is titled “The Influence of Shared Consumption on Product Efficacy Perceptions: The Detrimental Effect of Sharing with Strangers?” The lead author is Lama Lteif of the University of New Mexico, and the other co-authors are Lauren Block and Mahima Hada of the Baruch College at City University of New York.

Kramer said he expects the results of the paper to inform managers for more effective and efficient use of shared products, while also minimizing the costs.

“We want people to share certain products, but we don't want them to overuse them,” he said.

Tags

UCR News

Thomas Kramer

Research News

Lonely? These Odd Rituals Can Help

ilseu — Thu, 04 Mar 2021 21:22:59 +0000

Lonely? These Odd Rituals Can Help ilseu Thu, 03/04/2021 - 13:22 More News Holly Ober March 03, 2021

If you dunk a tea bag repeatedly into your mug or open a cream-filled cookie to lick the filling, you might find coping with pandemic isolation a bit easier than others.

A UC Riverside-led study has found people who adopt unique rituals to make everyday tasks more meaningful might feel less lonely.

Thomas Kramer

“We found that something as simple as preparing tea in a certain way, as long as it’s interpreted as a ritual, can make the experience more meaningful,” said Thomas Kramer, a professor of marketing at UC Riverside’s School of Business. “This makes people feel less lonely.”

The paper, published in the Journal of Marketing Research, addressed the fact that people who experience chronic loneliness often feel their lives lack meaning. Rituals create meaning. Most rituals occur in celebratory, social, or religious group settings and draw upon and reinforce shared cultural values. But rituals are also an important part of consumer culture. These rituals do not draw from shared cultural values and might be created by marketers or individual consumers. Marketers have long known that rituals facilitate relationships with consumers and brands and between consumers themselves.

Kramer and co-authors Xuehua Wang, an associate professor of marketing at East China Normal University; and Yixia Sun, an assistant professor of marketing at Zhejiang University; sought to find out if rituals around everyday consumer products could also help people feel less lonely by imbuing use of the products with meaning.

“Nobody in marketing has ever looked at rituals with private meaning,” Kramer said. “A lot has been done on what they do, for example, promoting self-control. But no one has looked at whether or not idiosyncratic, private rituals provide meaning in the context of consumer products.”

After asking participants questions designed to assess their degree of chronic loneliness, the researchers told participants that consumers often adopt rituals around the consumption of everyday products. They asked about rituals the participants practice and asked them either to imagine or actually use the product in either the ritualistic way, such as the familiar “twist-lick-dunk” technique for eating cream-filled cookies, or engaging with the product the way they usually did.

They found that the participants who experienced the most chronic loneliness also habitually engaged in the most rituals around consumer products. Moreover, participants who completed activities the researchers designed to induce loneliness felt less lonely after completing a real or imagined act of ritualized consumption. They also indicated that they felt their life had more meaning after the action.

The findings show that consumers might engage more strongly with brands that create rituals around purchasing or using products because they find meaning and a sense of community. The authors also suggest that governments can do more to reduce widespread loneliness by promoting rituals that do not include particular product options and add meaning to lives devoid of meaning.

“Many people are trying to find structure right now because everything is so chaotic,” Kramer said. “The implications of our study are that if you feel lonely, find a ritual. It doesn’t have to be elaborate. It can help you feel less lonely by providing a sense of meaning and purpose.”

The authors note that though participants felt less lonely immediately after using the product, they did not follow up to determine how long this feeling lasted. They also note idiosyncratic consumption rituals might not be advisable for individuals with obsessive-compulsive disorders.

The paper, “Ritualistic Consumption Decreases Loneliness by Increasing Meaning,” is available.

___________________

Header photo: Emily Rudolph on Unsplash

Tags

Marketing

Thomas Kramer

UCR News

UCR Business Faculty: Editors of Top Journals

edraws — Tue, 13 Oct 2020 20:30:26 +0000

UCR Business Faculty: Editors of Top Journals edraws Tue, 10/13/2020 - 13:30 More News Laurie McLaughlin October 13, 2020

As the gatekeepers of significant research, journal editors have years of first-hand experience crafting high-quality papers, says John Haleblian, UCR’s associate dean, department chair and professor of management. “Six of our faculty members serve as co-editors or associate editors at eight leading journals across disciplines. This reflects the considerable depth of research talent at our business school.”

One of the newly appointed editors, Marketing Professor Thomas Kramer, associate dean of the undergraduate program, will assume a co-editor role with Journal of Consumer Psychology in January 2021. “One of the exciting aspects of being a co-editor is that I get to read the comments from reviewers who often have viewpoints different from my own based on their expertise,” says Kramer, who has been a member of various editorial boards over the years, and previously served as associate editor at the Journal of Consumer Psychology and the Journal of Consumer Research.

“Having so many faculty members at UCR’s business school serve as editors and shape their fields is impressive, especially considering we have fewer faculty members than many other schools.”

These current UC Riverside business school editors have an important role in promoting research innovation at their respective journals:

Subramanian Balachander, Albert O. Steffey Chair in Marketing and professor of marketing
Associate editor, Productions and Operations Management

Elodie Goodman, associate professor of operations and supply chain management
Senior editor, Production and Operations Management

Jean Helwege, Anderson Chair in Finance and professor of finance
Co-editor, Quarterly Journal of Finance
Associate editor, International Review of Finance
Associate editor, Journal of Financial Services Research

Mingyu (Max) Joo, assistant professor of marketing
Associate editor, Decision Sciences
Associate editor, Information Economics and Policy

Thomas Kramer, associate dean for the undergraduate programs and professor of marketing
Co-editor, Journal of Consumer Psychology

Richard Smith, Philip L. Boyd Chair in Finance and professor of finance
Associate editor, Journal of Corporate Finance

Tags

Thomas Kramer