Across twelve studies, my dissertation explores how consumer behavior is influenced by a ubiquitous but understudied environmental factor: the salience of disease-related cues. Recent research in evolutionary psychology posits that the potency of disease threat over millennia has led humans to develop a host of adaptive reactions designed to avoid infection, including an overgeneralized tendency to avoid other people ‒ because they are possible sources of contagion. In contrast to past research that has focused on how such adaptive strategies affect interpersonal processes, I demonstrate that the basic human motive to guard against diseases can have far-reaching effects that manifest in completely unrelated non-social contexts. Specifically, merging Insights from evolutionary psychology...[ Read more ]

Across twelve studies, my dissertation explores how consumer behavior is influenced by a ubiquitous but understudied environmental factor: the salience of disease-related cues. Recent research in evolutionary psychology posits that the potency of disease threat over millennia has led humans to develop a host of adaptive reactions designed to avoid infection, including an overgeneralized tendency to avoid other people ‒ because they are possible sources of contagion. In contrast to past research that has focused on how such adaptive strategies affect interpersonal processes, I demonstrate that the basic human motive to guard against diseases can have far-reaching effects that manifest in completely unrelated non-social contexts. Specifically, merging Insights from evolutionary psychology with the literature on product atypicality, I propose that exposure to disease-related cues will heighten individuals' preference for atypical (vs. typical) products, because such products are implicitly associated with few (vs. many) consumers and thereby align with the other-avoidance motive induced by disease threat.

The first set of experiments demonstrates this atypicality preference effect and provides support for the interpersonal avoidance motive as an underlying mechanism. I further show that the basic effect can be eliminated or reversed when critical assumptions in my conceptualization are invalidated. Beyond the basic atypicality preference effect, my dissertation also reconciles my finding with a seemingly-discrepant prediction based on research in the interpersonal context, in which disease salience has been shown to enhance conformity.

While my dissertation focuses primarily on how disease cues influence product preference, the final part of my dissertation leverages on the basic premise that disease threat demotivates consumers from affiliating with others to conduct an initial, exploratory examination of a different aspect of consumer behavior: the desire for money. In particular, I propose and find that exposure to disease threats increases consumers' desire for money, and the related tendency towards materialism.