'I read Playboy for the Articles': Justifying and Rationalizing Questionable Preferences

Zoe  Chance; Michael I. Norton

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Working Paper | HBS Working Paper Series | 2009

'I read Playboy for the Articles': Justifying and Rationalizing Questionable Preferences

by Zoe Chance and Michael I. Norton

Keywords: Job Search; Market Participation; Market Transactions; Marketplace Matching; Relationships; Social and Collaborative Networks;

Language: English

Format: Print

23 pages

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Citation:

Chance, Zoe, and Michael I. Norton. "'I read Playboy for the Articles': Justifying and Rationalizing Questionable Preferences." Harvard Business School Working Paper, No. 10-018, September 2009.

About the Author

Michael I. Norton

Harold M. Brierley Professor of Business Administration
Director of Research

Marketing

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Working Paper | 2019

Minimalism as a Status Symbol: When and Why We Admire Conspicuous Non-Consumption

Anne Wilson, Silvia Bellezza and Michael I. Norton

Citation:
Wilson, Anne, Silvia Bellezza, and Michael I. Norton. "Minimalism as a Status Symbol: When and Why We Admire Conspicuous Non-Consumption." Working Paper, October 2019. View Details

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Article | Journal of Consumer Psychology

The Feeling of Not Knowing It All

Haiyang Yang, Ziv Carmon, Dan Ariely and Michael I. Norton

How do consumers assess their mastery of knowledge they have learned? We explore this question by investigating a common knowledge consumption situation: encountering opportunities for further learning. We argue and show that such opportunities can trigger a feeling-of-not-knowing-it-all (FONKIA), which lowers consumers’ confidence in their mastery of the knowledge they already possess. Specifically, listing optional follow-up readings at the conclusion of a course lowered students’ confidence in their mastery of the course material they had already learned (Study 1). Encountering an optional learning opportunity increased the FONKIA, which mediated the decreased confidence (Studies 2 and 3). We also document two moderators consistent with our conceptualization. First, participants primed with mastery (vs. instrumental) motivation were more negatively impacted when they encountered optional learning opportunities. Second, the more related the optional opportunities were to the target topic, the lower participants’ confidence in their mastery of what they had already learned. We conclude by discussing the implications of these findings, such as encouraging further learning or harming teaching evaluations.

Keywords: Knowledge consumption; Consumption of learning; Judgment of knowledge; Feeling ofknowing; Confidence in knowledge; WYSIATI; FONKIA; Knowledge Acquisition; Learning; Perception;

Citation:
Yang, Haiyang, Ziv Carmon, Dan Ariely, and Michael I. Norton. "The Feeling of Not Knowing It All." Journal of Consumer Psychology 29, no. 3 (July 2019): 455–462. View Details

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Working Paper | 2019

Hidden in Plain Sight: Consumer Responses to Pseudo-Secrets in Marketing

Dafna Goor, Anat Keinan, Nir Halevy and Michael I. Norton

Citation:
Goor, Dafna, Anat Keinan, Nir Halevy, and Michael I. Norton. "Hidden in Plain Sight: Consumer Responses to Pseudo-Secrets in Marketing." Working Paper, June 2019. (Under review at the Journal of Consumer Research.) View Details

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'I read Playboy for the Articles': Justifying and Rationalizing Questionable Preferences

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