Published Research
Winet, Y. K.*, Yanping Tu*, Shoham Choshen-Hillel, and Ayelet Fishbach (2022), “Social exploration: When people deviate from options explored by others,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 122 (3), 427-442.
People often face choices between known options and unknown ones. Our research documents a social-exploration effect: People are more likely to explore unknown options when they learn about known options from other people’s experiences. Across four studies (N = 2,333), we used an incentive-compatible paradigm where participants chose between known and unknown options (e.g., cash bonuses). We found higher exploration rates (i.e., choosing of unknown options) when information about known options came from other people, compared with an unidentified source (Study 1a) or a computer (Studies 1b–4). We theorize that the social-exploration effect results from people’s tendency to intuitively adopt a group-level perspective with other people: a “we”-perspective. Thus, in social contexts, people explore more to diversify their experience as a group. Supporting this account, we find the effect attenuates in exploration of losses, where people do not wish to adopt a group-level perspective of others’ losses (Study 2). Furthermore, the effect is obtained only if others have experienced the outcome; not when they only revealed its content (Study 3). Finally, the social-exploration effect generalizes to everyday choices, such as choosing a movie to watch (Study 4). Taken together, these findings highlight the social aspect of individual exploration decisions and offer practical implications for how to encourage exploration.
*Joint first authorship
Winet, Y. K. and Ed O’Brien (in press), “Ending on a familiar note: Perceived endings motivate repeat consumption,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.
People fill their free time by choosing between hedonic activities that are new and exciting (e.g., exploring a buzzed-about restaurant) versus old and familiar (e.g., revisiting the same old spot). The dominant psychological assumption is that, holding constant factors like cost, availability, and convenience between acquiring such options, people will prefer novelty (“variety is the spice of life”). Eight preregistered experiments (total N = 5,889) reveal that people’s attraction to novelty depends, at least in part, on their temporal context—namely, on perceived endings. As participants faced a shrinking window of opportunity to enjoy a general category of experience (even merely temporarily; e.g., eating one’s last dessert before starting a diet), their hedonic preferences shifted away from new and exciting options and toward old favorites. This relative shift emerged across many domains (e.g., food, travel, music), situations (e.g., impending New Year’s resolutions, COVID-19 shut-downs), and consequential behaviors (e.g., choices with financial stakes). Using both moderation and mediation approaches, we found that perceived endings increase familiarity preferences because they increase people’s desire to ensure a personally meaningful experience on which to end, which returns to old favorites generally provide more than exploring novelty does. Endings increased participants’ preferences for old favorites even when it meant sacrificing other desirable attributes (e.g., exciting stimulation). Together, these findings advance and bridge research on hedonic preferences, time and timing, and the motivational effects of change. Variety may be the “spice of life,” but familiarity may be the spice of life’s endings.
Davenport, Diag and Yuji K. Winet (2022), “Pivotal voting: The opportunity to tip group decisions skews juries and other voting outcomes,” Proceedings National Academy of Sciences, 119 (32).
Many important social and policy decisions are made by small groups of people (e.g., juries, college admissions officers, corporate boards) with the hope that a collective process will yield better and fairer decisions. In many instances, it is possible for these groups to fail to reach a decision by not garnering a minimum number of votes (e.g., hung juries). Our research finds that pivotal voters vote to avoid such decision failure—voters who can “tip” their group into a punishment decision will be more likely to do so. This effect is distinct from well-known social pressures to simply conform with others or reach unanimity. Using observational data from Louisiana court cases, we find a sharp discontinuity in juries’ voting decisions at the threshold between indecision and conviction (Study 1). In a third-party punishment paradigm, pivotal voters were more likely to vote to punish a target than non-pivotal voters, even when holding social information constant (Study 2), and adopted harsher views about the target's deservingness of punishment (Study 3). Using vignettes, we find that pivotal voters are judged to be differentially responsible for the outcomes of their votes—those who ‘block’ the group from reaching a punishment decision are deemed more responsible for the outcome than those who “fall in line” (Study 4). These findings provide insight into how we might improve group decision-making environments to ensure that their outcomes accurately reflect group members’ actual beliefs and not the influence of social pressures.
Working Papers
Working Papers
Winet, Yuji K. and Ed O’Brien (in preparation for Journal of Consumer Research), “Callbacks: How unexpected familiarity influences evaluation and choice.”
Consumers often forego the old and familiar in favor of more exciting novelty to improve their hedonic experiences. And yet, one underappreciated approach to leveraging familiarity may be to present it in a surprising way. This research tests whether experiences may benefit from using unexpected allusions to familiar moments from earlier in a given experience (“callbacks”). Across four main experiments (N = 1,957), we find that callbacks improve hedonic experiences and affect choices, even outside of the hedonic domain. Comedic stories are evaluated more favorably when they use callbacks, even while controlling for other valuable comedy-writing techniques (Study 1). The temporal separation between a callback and its target reference point matters, such that bigger gaps make callbacks more effective (Study 2). On average, we found that consumers expect allusions to immediately follow their reference point, which may help to reveal the benefit of bigger gaps—they make allusions to the familiar more unexpected (Study 3). Extending these findings, we tested whether callbacks might affect choices in a non-hedonic domain: a donation context. We found that consumers chose more often to engage with the promotional materials of a charitable organization more when those materials used a callback (Study 4). Taking these findings into account, architects of consumer experiences may strategically harness callbacks to design better experiences and influence meaningful choice.
Banerjee, Akshina and Yuji K. Winet (in preparation for Journal of Consumer Research), “Hierarchical Variety Seeking”
How might preferences for variety change when choices are nested within other choices (e.g., choosing a dish at a given restaurant vs. choosing the restaurant)? We consider whether navigating options at multiple levels of hierarchical choice predicts diverging preferences for variety. Specifically, across five main experiments (N = 1,361), we test whether consumers prefer more variety at higher hierarchical levels (e.g., restaurants) and less variety at lower hierarchical levels (e.g., dishes). We find that consumers prefer more variety at higher levels than lower levels across time in a hypothetical restaurant scenario (Study 1), and across other hedonic domains (e.g., spas, hotels, comedy shows; Study 2). This effect could not be fully explained by a potential sequence effect—a natural tendency to choose higher-level options before lower-level ones. When forced to choose lower-level options first, consumers continued to prefer greater variety among higher-level options (Study 3). Consumers preferred more variety at higher levels even when they chose from familiar higher-level (i.e., restaurant) options generated by the consumers themselves, suggesting that differential familiarity with options at different hierarchical levels also could not explain the effect. (Study 4). Furthermore, this preference asymmetry is resistant to spillover effects—restricting options at a higher level of choice did not influence preferences for variety at a lower level of choice (Study 5). In total, these findings shed light on a novel framework for understanding how consumers’ variety preferences differ across different types of choices.