Stand Up or Stand Back? Understanding and Leveraging the Effects of Controversial Stands (full manuscript available upon request)
Brands often face controversy when they take a stand on public interest issues. Across six preregistered experiments, this paper shows that brands that face controversy appear morally ambiguous. On the one hand, controversy increases perceived brand agency: the brand appears willing and able to pursue valued goals despite opposition. On the other hand, controversy increases perceived harm: the brand appears willing to upset those who disagree with its position. These perceptions have opposing effects on purchase intentions, such that the positive effect of agency is often offset, or even overshadowed, by the negative effect of harm—even among supporters of a stand. However, controversy is not inherently detrimental. This work theorizes and shows that when consumers construe an issue as zero-sum, they tolerate controversy and can even express higher purchase intentions and choice for a brand that faces controversy relative to a brand that does not. Yet a survey with managers reveals that they are especially reluctant to engage with zero-sum issues but more willing to engage with non-zero-sum issues, where controversy is most detrimental. By uncovering when and why controversy is more likely to benefit versus hurt brands, this research provides guidance to managers struggling to appropriately navigate ideologically and morally polarized markets.
Significance on the Edge: How Robust are p-values to Small Sample Exclusions? (full manuscript available upon request)
p-value thresholds are widely used to determine “statistical significance” of results in marketing experiments. However, there is limited empirical evidence on how sensitive p-values are to selective small sample exclusions. We investigate this issue across 63 experimental studies published in leading marketing journals and find that a majority of these studies (60%) lose statistical significance when less than 5% of the sample is selectively removed. Additionally, 50% of studies lose significance even using a more conservative threshold value of 0.1. We illustrate this fragility using the Significance Fadeaway Score (SFS), a simple, context-free robustness check that quantifies how many extreme observations can be removed before a p-value crosses the conventional .05 threshold. In doing so, this research adds to the ongoing methodological discussions in marketing research challenging the dichotomous framework for determining statistical significance and highlights the importance of interpreting evidence using complementary lenses, including confidence intervals, effect sizes, practical significance, and robustness measures.
Body-Shape Politics: The Political Divide in Body-Inclusive Advertising (full manuscript available upon request)
Brands increasingly feature plus-size women in advertising, challenging prevailing beauty standards. However, research shows heterogenous consumer reactions to plus-size portrayals—This work proposes and finds that one factor explaining heterogeneous reactions is political ideology. Across four pre-registered studies, we show that political conservatism predicts less favorable brand attitudes and purchase intentions toward ads featuring plus-size (vs. slim) models. This reflects conservatives’ stronger motivation to maintain status hierarchies in the beauty domain, where slim bodies are culturally construed as superior and larger bodies as inferior. These effects are mediated by social dominance orientation—a tendency among conservatives to prefer hierarchical social structures and status-based differentiation between groups. Findings provide managers with an actionable segmentation variable and helps them anticipate for whom and why body-inclusive portrayals can backfire. Finally, these effects emerge specifically when a plus-size model’s status is grounded in appearance—thereby challenging a beauty-based hierarchy—but disappears when status is anchored in achievement, which upholds an alternative, merit-based hierarchy and decouples body weight from social rank. The latter finding suggests that emphasizing non-appearance-based sources of status can mitigate conservative resistance to portrayals of plus-size models in ads, offering brands a way to promote body-inclusivity while averting ideological resistance.
Behind Bars, Beyond Stigma: Consumer Responses to Prisoner-made Products
Prison labor is widespread, yet managers rarely disclose prisoners’ involvement in production. This reluctance is consistent with concerns about producer stigma: in a survey of managers, most expected disclosure of prison labor to harm consumer responses. Contrary to this intuition, the present research shows that consumers respond more positively to products when they learn that the products were made by prisoners. Across six experiments using laboratory and online samples, hypothetical and real prisoner-made products, and multiple comparison groups, this research finds that disclosing prisoner involvement increases product attitudes and willingness to buy. The proposed account is that consumers perceive work performed by prisoners as particularly meaningful: in the adverse context of incarceration, work is seen as providing purpose, dignity, and the potential for personal transformation. Mediation and process by moderation evidence support this account. The positive indirect effect through perceived work meaningfulness weakens when meaningfulness is independently increased by connecting the product to the producer’s identity and experiences, and it diminishes when the prisoner is described as having committed a severe crime, which constrains perceptions that work can serve as a meaningful and transformative activity. Together, these findings show that perceived work meaningfulness can counteract negative responses associated with stigmatized producers and influence how consumers evaluate the products they make.
Project-location Congruity: When Green Projects Match Green Locations
This work investigates how the perceived congruity between environmental project types and their proposed locations influences public evaluations. Drawing on schema congruity theory, the study proposes that green projects are evaluated more favorably when situated in environmentally aligned settings. Across three experimental studies using different types of green and non-green projects and various types of locations, results show that congruent project-location pairings (e.g., green projects in green areas and brownfields, or non-green projects in industrial zones) lead to more positive attitudes and higher success estimations. These findings extend the literature on perceptual congruity and environmental policy by highlighting how perceptual alignment influences laypeople’s evaluations of sustainability initiatives. Practical implications for policymakers and urban developers are also discussed.
Benign to Whom? Political Ideology and the Moral Boundaries of Humor
Benign Violation Theory proposes that humor arises when a violation is simultaneously perceived as wrong and benign. But whether a violation is benign should depend on how strongly an observer is committed to the norm being violated. The present research integrates Benign Violation Theory with Moral Foundations Theory to propose that moral commitments systematically predict the boundaries of humor. Specifically, humor appreciation should decline when a humorous stimulus violates a moral foundation to which the observer is strongly committed because the violation is less likely to be perceived as benign. Thus, commitment to care, fairness, loyalty, authority, and purity should differentially predict responses to humor that violates each corresponding foundation. Political ideology provides one systematic source of variation in these moral commitments and therefore helps predict which moral violations different consumers are likely to find humorous. This research thereby conceptualizes benignity not as a fixed property of humorous content, but as an observer-dependent judgment arising from the match between the moral norm being violated and the evaluator’s commitment to that norm.