A. Peter McGrawDoctoral Symposium ACR 2008

Breaking with tradition:Immediately tell your reader

about your contribution

Thank you

Elissa Guralnick

Professor of English

University of Colorado, Boulder

Introduction

• Identify your central idea

• State that idea at the beginning of your paper

• Arguments against and for

• Examples

Your central idea

• What is your contribution?

• Create and solve a puzzle:

– X says Y, but A says B. I resolve this apparent discrepancy by means of Z

– People readily accept that G is true, but I show that what appears to be G is actually F

– Based on literature P, you might expect to find Q, but because of R that is not the case

State your central idea

• Right away

• In one to three paragraphs

• Write it for non-experts (see Bem 1995, 2003; Peracchio & Escalas, 2008)

Reasons against

• Paper already has an abstract

• Status quo (i.e., tradition)

Reasons for

• Provides clarity and organization

• Gives you a voice

• Fluency and thin slicing (e.g., Oppenheimer, 2005; Peracchio & Escalas, 2008)

• Benefits many types of readers– Reviewers, editors, committee members

– Expert reader

– Casual reader

– Citation searcher

– Non-experts (e.g., professionals, policymakers, journalists, your mom)

Example 1: Kahneman and Tversky (1979)

• Expected utility theory has dominated the analysis of decision making under risk. It has been generally accepted as a normative model of rational choice [24], and widely applied as a descriptive model of economic behavior, e.g. [15, 4]. Thus, it is assumed that all reasonable people would wish to obey the axioms of the theory [47, 36], and that most people actually do, most of the time. The present paper describes several classes of choice problems in which preferences systematically violate the axioms of expected utility theory. In the light of these observations we argue that utility theory, as it is commonly interpreted and applied, is not an adequate descriptive model and we propose an alternative account of choice under risk.

Example 2: Karremans, Stroebe, & Claus (2006)

• Subliminal advertising became notorious in 1957 through the publicity surrounding James Vicary, a private market researcher, who claimed to have substantially increased sales of Coca Cola and popcorn in a movie theatre, by secretly and subliminally presenting the message “Drink Coca Cola” and “Eat popcorn.” Nobody has replicated Vicary’s findings; his study has never been published and appears to have been a publicity hoax (Pratkanis, 1992). In the present article, we argue that Vicary’s fantasies do have some basis of reality. We argue that subliminally priming a brand name for a drink can increase the likelihood that participants will choose that drink, given the opportunity to do so. But importantly, as we will argue and demonstrate, priming of a brand name for a drink will only affect choice behavior of people who are thirsty (i.e., have a goal to drink) and not of people who are not thirsty.

Example 3: Peracchio and Escalas (2008)

• In this article, we propose that the difference between consumer psychology articles that are accepted for publication and the top 20% of submissions that are rejected is good writing, in particular, the inclusion of a compelling story (Bem, 2000). Our article is more than a call for good writing in the sense that there are few grammatical mistakes, although that does play a role. Rather, we assert that weaving a consistent story throughout your prose is essential to writing an excellent consumer psychology paper (Eisenberg, 2000; Salovey, 2000). Why? Stories are powerful prisms for understanding and framing empirical research and provide readers with a coherent account facilitating their understanding and appreciation for a phenomenon (Baumeister & Newman, 1994).

Example 4: Levav and McGraw (In Press)

• Although mental accounting research suggests that financial windfalls are spent more readily and frivolously than ordinary income, windfalls are sometimes spent reluctantly or virtuously—a consumption pattern that mental accounting does not predict. We introduce and test the related concept of emotional accounting, in which money is labeled by the feeling it evokes; this emotional label, in turn, influences how the money is spent. We show that when the feelings evoked by a windfall are negative, consumers engage in strategic consumption to cope with the negativity. In particular, they avoid hedonic purchases in order not to exacerbate their negative feelings and, when possible, they seek to use the money for relatively virtuous or utilitarian expenditures in order to alleviate or “launder” their negative feelings about the money. By incorporating consumers’ feelings about a sum of money into mental accounting, we explain behaviors that deviate from previously documented purchase patterns.

Conclusion

• Identify your contribution– Create and solve a puzzle

• State your contribution right away– Don’t bury your hypothesis

– Write a brief (1-3 paragraph) introduction for a diverse, intelligent, but non-expert audience

– Then follow with Bem’s hourglass or your preferred style

Conclusion

• Identify your contribution– Create and solve a puzzle

• State your contribution right away– Don’t bury your hypothesis

– Write a brief (1-3 paragraph) introduction for a diverse, intelligent, but non-expert audience

– Then follow with Bem’s hourglass or your preferred style