Essays on Self-Perception in Decision Making: How Self-Perceived Attractiveness Affects Consumer Choice and Judgment

Beauty has been universally prized throughout history. It has been associated with a host of positive qualities: beautiful people are believed to be more socially competent and more intelligent, to possess more favorable personality traits, and to have more successful life outcomes (Dion, Berscheid, and Walster 1972; Eagly et al. 1991). Despite the notion that "beautiful is good," consumer choice research has not studied how people's perceptions of their own physical attractiveness impact their decision making. In the first two essays, I explore how people's perceptions of their physical attractiveness impact their choices and judgments about the future through a novel method of experimentally boosting participants' perceptions of their physical attractiveness.;In the first essay, I propose that feeling more physically attractive causes decision makers to feel more confident in their abilities overall and, in turn, more certain in their preferences, leading them to make more extreme choices. Previous literature in choice theory suggests that people tend to gravitate to compromise options -- options that have intermediate values on all dimensions -- as well as default options, when they are uncertain in their preferences (Dhar and Simonson 2003; Simonson and Tversky 1992). Combining the literature on choice with the prediction that boosting people's perceptions of their beauty will increase their confidence in abilities (Feingold 1992), I predict that people who receive a boost in beauty should be more likely to choose extreme over compromise options.;I conducted six studies, which demonstrate that making people feel more beautiful indeed increases their general confidence, leading to increased preference for extreme over compromise options, enriched over all-average options, and for departure from the status-quo. In addition, this shift in choice share occurs because participants incorrectly attribute their increased confidence to confidence in their preferences.;In the next essay, having shown that feeling attractive can increase confidence in one's abilities, I explore how feeling physically attractive affects long-term decisions that require planning. Previous research has shown that the "above average" effect is pervasive in psychology: across many domains, people are overconfident in their abilities and overly optimistic about their futures (Weinstein 1980). While generally beneficial, unrealistic optimism can also have negative consequences, such as the planning fallacy, people's tendency to underestimate the amount of time that it takes to complete a future task, despite knowledge that similar previous tasks have taken longer than planned (Buehler, Griffin, and Ross 1994). Given that people who feel more beautiful have higher self-esteem and are more confident overall (Feingold 1992), I predict that they would be more optimistic about the future and would be worse at planning.;Three studies support this hypothesis and together show that people made to feel more beautiful are indeed more optimistic about their futures. Participants who receive a boost in beauty are also worse at planning because they are more confident in their abilities, and this confidence leads them to envision a rosier future where fewer obstacles arise.;For the last essay, I move to a more applied marketing domain. Whereas the previous two essays explored the effect of people's perceptions of themselves on their choices and judgments about the future, here I explore the effect of people's perceptions of a firm's intentions on their judgments of product quality and their likelihood of purchase for environmentally-friendly products. While conventional marketing wisdom suggests that adding desirable features should increase the overall appeal of a product (Mukherjee and Hoyer 2001; Thompson, Hamilton, and Rust 2005), this research argues that communicating the intention to improve a product by making it more environmentally friendly may have the opposite effect, leading consumers to infer that the product is lower in quality and, in turn, to want to purchase it less than when an environmental improvement arises as an accidental by-product.;Four studies demonstrate this effect and investigate the mechanism behind it, showing that this inference stems from a belief that a company that makes an environmental enhancement to a product does so by diverting resources away from product quality. In sum, we show a surprising effect of firm intentions on consumer preferences, demonstrating that consumers rate a product with an environmental enhancement as higher in quality and are more likely to purchase it when the enhancement arises unintentionally as compared to when the firm intentionally improves the product. Together, these essays all explore the powerful effect of consumers' perceptions, of themselves and of the company, on their decisions.