ABSTRACT
The field of consumer psychology seeks to understand how and why individual and social factors affect consumers’ thoughts, perceptions, and behavior. For example, research in consumer psychology has examined the relationship between mood and persuasion (Petty, Schumann, Richman, & Strathman, 1993), interruptions and behavioral intentions (Kupor & Tormala, 2015), as well as communicator power and the content of word-of-mouth communications (Dubois, Rucker, & Galinsky, 2016). Central to each of the research endeavors is a desire to understand both the causal relationship between an independent variable and a dependent variable (i.e., the how) and to offer a psychological explanation for the observed relationship (i.e., the why).
