Art Vortrag/Diskussion
SpracheEnglisch
Vortragende/r Krishna Savani (Associate Professor at Nanyang Business School, Singapore)
Veranstalter Institut für Marketing & Consumer Research
Kontakt helga.karl@wu.ac.at

Extensive research in psychology has shown that providing people with objective choices can impact their decision making. I propose that even in the same objective circumstances, people can perceive themselves and others as either merely engaging in a series of actions (a neutral action mindset) or making a series of choices (a choice mindset). Going beyond the task-specific benefits of actual choices, my research shows that activating the choice mindset can have a broad range of downstream consequences in diverse unrelated domains. When judging others, people in a choice mindset put responsibility on the individual rather than on contextual factors, thus becoming more susceptible to the fundamental attribution error and being more likely to blame the victim. In a similar vein, people in a choice mindset put responsibility for societal problems, such as wealth inequality, primarily on individuals (e.g., “rich people make good choices, poor people made bad choices”) rather than on the context (e.g., such as regressive tax systems). Even when it is obvious that outcomes are determined by external factors, people in a choice mindset hold individuals responsible for their outcomes, thereby magnifying the outcome bias. In general, people in a choice mindset think more analytically rather than holistically, focusing on the parts of a phenomenon rather than the whole. A field experiment shows that a chronic choice mindset can lead to increased well-being. Specifically, although students’ positive affect tended to decline as they approached the end of the semester, a six week choice mindset intervention arrested this decline, helping students allocate their time in a way that maintains their positive affect. Links between the choice mindset and related constructs, such as power, status, and money, will be discussed.