served as editor and Frank Kardes served as associate editor for this article.

This research examines how package size can influence quality judgments for packaged goods, and also identifies a price‐based mechanism for the observed size–quality relationship. Results from several studies show that a product in a smaller package is rated more favorably than the equivalent product in a larger package. Further, this effect is due to the smaller package being associated with a higher unit price (despite having a lower overall price), which suggests that unit price information is more diagnostic than overall price information when forming judgments of product quality. We also find a theoretically‐derived reversal of this effect under conditions in which the greater diagnosticity of unit price is overwhelmed by its lower ease of use. Namely, when overall price is the only explicitly‐provided price cue and consumers are too distracted to estimate unit price, a larger package is now rated as being better. Finally, two concluding studies examine the downstream consequences of changes in package size, building off our basic conceptualization to document effects on product choice as well as consumption experience.

The influence of psychological distance on construal level has been extensively documented in both social psychology and consumer research, with proximal (distal) events shown to induce low-level (high-level) construals. However, the extant literature takes a black box approach, as it were, to this effect by viewing it in terms of a direct association between distance and construal level, without specifying any intervening variables. The current research seeks to unpack this black box and provide more detailed process insights by identifying such an intervening variable: processing mode. We argue that people tend to rely more on visual processing when construing proximal events while engaging in a greater degree of verbal processing with regard to distal targets; in turn, visual processing is more likely to yield concrete (low-level) representations, whereas verbal processing facilitates abstract (high-level) representations. This unpacked formulation not only provides additional theoretical insight into a classic effect but also yields implications that are novel to the literature. In particular, emphasizing the role of processing mode (1) enables an identification of boundary conditions for the distanceconstrual effect, and (2) indicates when and why well-established consequences of psychological distance on consumer preferences can be reversed. Results from five studies provide convergent support for our key proposition and its corollaries.

This research examines how consumers use base rate (e.g., disease prevalence in a population) and case information (e.g., an individual's disease symptoms) to estimate health risks. Drawing on construal level theory, we propose that consumers' reliance on base rate (case information) will be enhanced (weakened) by psychological distance. A corollary of this premise is that self-positivity (i.e., underestimating self-risk vs. other-risk) is likely when the disease base rate is high but the case information suggests low risk. In contrast, self-negativity (i.e., overestimating self-risk vs. other-risk) is likely when the disease base rate is low, but case information implies high risk. Six experiments provide convergent support for this thesis, using different operationalizations of construal level, base rate, and case risk across multiple health domains. Our findings inform the extant literature on health-risk perception and also provide theoretical implications for research on social comparisons, as well as that on the use of base rate versus case information.A necdotal evidence suggests that people sometimes suffer from a self-negativity bias when it comes to forming health-risk assessments, such that we fear the worst possible outcomes when it comes to our own health, while maintaining a calm objectivity (sometimes infuriatingly so!) with regard to others. For example, when someone else suffers from indigestion, we accurately perceive it as being merely indigestion, but the same symptom in ourselves can lead to worries about a possible heart attack (Leahy 2006); likewise, a lump can induce worries about breast cancer in Dengfeng Yan (dengfeng@ust.hk) is currently a doctoral candidate in marketing at