ASSOCIATION FOR CONSUMER RESEARCH Association for Consumer Research, University of Minnesota Duluth, 115 Chester Park, 31 West College Street Duluth, MN 55812 Full Disclosure: How Smartphones Enhance Consumer Self-Disclosure Shiri Melumad, University of Pennsylvania, USA Robert Meyer, University of Pennsylvania, USA The effects of smartphone versus PC usage on consumer’s willingness to disclose personal information is explored. Analyses of large- scale field data show that user-generated content written on smartphones is more self-disclosing than that on PCs. Controlled lab experiments provide convergent evidence for this effect and explore its underlying mechanisms. [to cite]: Shiri Melumad and Robert Meyer (2019) ,"Full Disclosure: How Smartphones Enhance Consumer Self-Disclosure", in NA - Advances in Consumer Research Volume 47, eds. Rajesh Bagchi, Lauren Block, and Leonard Lee, Duluth, MN : Association for Consumer Research, Pages: 45-50. [url]: http://www.acrwebsite.org/volumes/2550781/volumes/v47/NA-47 [copyright notice]: This work is copyrighted by The Association for Consumer Research. For permission to copy or use this work in whole or in part, please contact the Copyright Clearance Center at http://www.copyright.com/. The Modern Consumer: How New Technologies are Changing Consumer Behaviors and Interactions Chair: Shiri Melumad, University of Pennsylvania, USA Paper #1: Technology-Mediated Innovation new technologies and humanization. Christian Hildebrand, Donna Melanie S. Brucks, Columbia University, USA Hoffman, and Tom Novak examine how the constricted nature of Jonathan Levav, Stanford University, USA verbal communication that typically marks consumers’ interactions with IoT devices (e.g., Amazon Alexa) acts to dehumanize such in- Paper #2: Full Disclosure: How Smartphones Enhance teractions, reducing consumers’ overall satisfaction with IoT experi- Consumer Self-Disclosure ences. Finally, the session concludes with work by Juliana Schroeder, Shiri Melumad, University of Pennsylvania, USA who explores a different aspect of humanization: that which arises Robert Meyer, University of Pennsylvania, USA when consumers engage in conflict via text or in person. She finds Paper #3: Dehumanization in the IoT: Experiential that while consumers turn to text-based communication in the belief Consequences of Syntactically Constricted Human-Machine that it will deflate conflict with an ideological opponent, such inter- Interaction action instead acts to dehumanize conversants and thus inflate the Christian Hildebrand, University of St. Gallen, Switzerland degree of conflict. Donna Hoffman, George Washington University, USA We believe that this session will contribute to the conference Tom Novak, George Washington University, USA by showcasing research on human-technology interactions, an in- Paper #4: Improving Civil Discourse: Speaking is a More creasingly important topic that spans disciplines such as psychology, Humanizing Form of Discourse Than Writing sociology, anthropology, and computer science. We hope that con- Juliana Schroeder, University of California, Berkeley, USA sumer researchers will play a major role in this field as it continues to develop, and that this session will illustrate the potential research SESSION OVERVIEW opportunities in this area. Recent years have witnessed a rapid expansion in the types of technologies that consumers use to browse, consume, make deci- Technology-Mediated Innovation sions, and communicate. As an example, 77% of the adult population in the United States now owns a smartphone (Pew Research Center EXTENDED ABSTRACT 2018), with the device being used not just for communication but The move to virtual teams is one of the most notable business also to perform almost all online activities. In addition, more than 20 trends of the last decade. 43% of people today work remotely (Gallup billion smart objects, such as Amazon Echo devices, are connected 2017), and 65% of firms now use distributed teams (Upwork 2018). to the Internet (Howell 2017). These technological devices have even Underlying this shift to remote work are new technological advances become increasingly interconnected, with consumers using smart- that enable virtual collaboration, such as video-conferencing. The im- phones to operate their smart technologies and automate behaviors plicit presumption is that these technologies can replace face-to-face and decisions they used to make themselves. The consequences for interaction. In the present research, we test this assumption for one practitioners have been no less dramatic: whereas firms were once of the most important collaboration processes in marketing: creating mostly confined to in-person interactions with customers, these com- new products, where teams brainstorm nascent ideas and then select munications are now increasingly conducted through a constellation ideas to develop into proposals and/or prototypes. Importantly, these of textual, visual, and other virtual media. two tasks correspond to different psychological processes: while idea The goal of this special session is to shed light on a burgeoning generation leverages expansive, unregulated thinking (Nijstad and field of research on the psychological consequences of consumers’ Stroebe 2006), idea evaluation and selection benefits from analytical engagement with new technologies. The session will be comprised of and deliberative thinking (Amer, Campbell, and Hasher 2016). four papers that explore two central questions in this area: Does communicating in-person meaningfully differ from video- 1. How might new technologies be changing consumer behavior conferencing for these two processes of new product development? and decision-making? At first blush, it seems like the effect of communication modality 2. Under which conditions, and to what extent, are new technolo- should be quite trivial. Indeed, contingent on good internet connec- gies enhancing or harming consumer well-being? tion and high-resolution display, video-conferencing closely mimics in-person conversation: it is synchronous (unlike email) and reveals The first two papers in this session explore this first question. almost identical visual and audio information about the partner (un- Melanie Brucks and Jonathan Levav explore how video-conferenc- like phone calls). However, we propose that an important difference ing affects collaboration processes in new product development. lies in the shared environment: In-person teams share the entire room They find that while video conferencing curtails the number of new while, over video, teams only share the screen in front of them. Con- ideas generated, it facilitates identification of the best idea. Next, sequently, virtual teams should primarily look at the video screen, as Shiri Melumad and Robert Meyer investigate how consumers’ in- the majority of the room is not accessible to their partner. When vir- creased reliance on their smartphone may be affecting user-generated tual teams concentrate on the screen and filter out peripheral visual content in a way that has important policy implications. The authors stimuli, their visual attention is narrowed (Wade and Tatler 2005). find that consumers tend to disclose information that is more sensi- Drawing on research suggesting that cognitive states are sticky tive or personal when generating content on their smartphone versus (Luchins 1942) and are often recruited for other tasks once activat- PC. ed (Malkoc, Zauberman, and Bettman 2010; Moreau and Engeset The third and fourth papers then explore the second key ques- 2015), we posit that this narrow visual focus spills over into the new tion of the session, with a particular focus on the relationship between product development tasks and activates cognitive focus. Important- ly, the focused cognitive state among virtual groups should suppress Advances in Consumer Research 45 Volume 47, ©2019 46 / The Modern Consumer: How New Technologies are Changing Consumer Behaviors and Interactions the expansive thinking needed for idea generation but conversely quences: virtual interaction may undercut the value of collaborative bolster the analytical thinking used in idea selection. brainstorming but can be leveraged for evaluation and development. We conducted two lab studies and one field experiment to test this hypothesis. In the first lab study, 150 dyads generated creative Full Disclosure: How Smartphones Enhance Consumer uses for a frisbee for five minutes and then selected their most cre- Self-Disclosure ative idea for one minute. These tasks were incentive-compatible: each creative idea earned one raffle ticket for a $200 raffle and select- EXTENDED ABSTRACT ing the most creative idea (as scored by outside judges) earned five The past fifteen years have witnessed two transformative trends raffle tickets. Teams were randomly assigned to work together for in consumer markets: firms’ reliance on user-generated content as a these tasks either in-person or virtually (with their partner displayed means of gaining insights into consumer preferences, and the emer- via video across from them). Virtual teams generated significantly gence of the smartphone—rather than personal computer—as the fewer creative ideas (M = 6.17) than in-person teams (M = 7.36, p = primary platform on which this content is generated. In this research we explore a question that lies at the intersection of these two trends: .005), but selected ideas that were more creative (Mvirtual = 4.71, Min- might the transition away from PCs toward smartphones