Consumers increasingly encounter recommender systems when making consumption decisions of all kinds. While numerous efforts have aimed to improve the quality of algorithm-generated recommendations, evidence has indicated that people often remain averse to superior algorithmic sources of information in favor of their own personal intuitions (a type II problem). The current work highlights an additional (type I) problem associated with the use of recommender systems: algorithm overdependence. Five experiments illustrate that, stemming from a belief that algorithms hold greater domain expertise, consumers surrender to algorithm-generated recommendations even when the recommendations are inferior. Counter to prior findings, this research indicates that consumers frequently depend too much on algorithm-generated recommendations, posing potential harms to their own well-being and leading them to play a role in propagating systemic biases that can influence other users. Given the rapidly expanding application of recommender systems across consumer domains, the authors believe that an appreciation and understanding of these risks is crucial to the effective guidance and development of recommendation systems that support consumer interests.
Self-control depletion has been linked both to increased selfish behavior and increased susceptibility to situational cues. The present research tested two competing hypotheses about the consequence of depletion by measuring how people allocate rewards between themselves and another person. Seven experiments analyzed behavior in standard dictator games and reverse dictator games, settings in which participants could take money from another person. Across all of these experiments, depleted participants made smaller changes to the initial allocation, thereby sticking closer to the default position (anchor) than non-depleted participants. These findings provide support for a "sticky anchor hypothesis," which states that the effects of depletion on behavior are influenced by the proximal situational cues rather than by directly stimulating selfishness per se.
Percent change in allocationsWe analyzed the extent to which depletion biased participants toward situational cues across both standard Depletion and Anchor Stickiness 1035 S. Banker et al.Figure 2. Dictator game results: Across seven studies including both standard dictator games (Experiments 4a and 4b) and reverse dictator games (Experiments 1, 2a, 2b, 3a, and 3b), depleted participants (light bars) compared with non-depleted participants (dark bars) made smaller deviations from the starting point, plotted as percent of endowment. N = 1290 1036 Journal of Behavioral Decision Making
Credit cards have often been blamed for consumer overspending and for the growth in household debt. Indeed, laboratory studies of purchase behavior have shown that credit cards can facilitate spending in ways that are difficult to justify on purely financial grounds. However, the psychological mechanisms behind this spending facilitation effect remain conjectural. A leading hypothesis is that credit cards reduce the pain of payment and so ‘release the brakes’ that hold expenditures in check. Alternatively, credit cards could provide a ‘step on the gas,’ increasing motivation to spend. Here we present the first evidence of differences in brain activation in the presence of real credit and cash purchase opportunities. In an fMRI shopping task, participants purchased items tailored to their interests, either by using a personal credit card or their own cash. Credit card purchases were associated with strong activation in the striatum, which coincided with onset of the credit card cue and was not related to product price. In contrast, reward network activation weakly predicted cash purchases, and only among relatively cheaper items. The presence of reward network activation differences highlights the potential neural impact of novel payment instruments in stimulating spending—these fundamental reward mechanisms could be exploited by new payment methods as we transition to a purely cashless society.
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