USC Marshall

Minimalist aesthetics are popular—but are they universally beneficial? I find aesthetically minimalist (vs. complex) packaging design leads consumers to expect products to be superior on utilitarian dimensions, but inferior on hedonic dimensions. This pattern is driven by inferences about the product’s focus and potential to stimulate, respectively.

People commonly experience long gaps of time between getting to do things they love to do. In turn, deprivation and desire should go hand in hand, assuming such gaps do not reflect a sour ending or changing interests: the longer it has been since people have gotten to enjoy something, the quicker they should jump at the chance to enjoy it again. Five experiments instead reveal the opposite: The longer since people’s last enjoyable experience, the more they demand their return be “extra special” to offset the wait—so the more they postpone returning. This effect emerged across many controlled parameters (e.g., participants avoided contacting close friends after large vs. small gaps in contact, all else equal). It further extended to COVID-19 contexts: Participants delayed returning to everyday activities even longer if it meant better marking the occasion—an effect that economists failed to predict, and that was uniquely attenuated by helping participants reconstrue the mundane as special. Together, these findings suggest long gaps can sometimes create psychological barriers to returning. This tension between lost time vs. high value violates traditional understandings of present bias, to one’s present detriment. Counterintuitively, people might increasingly avoid contacting loved ones, getting back into rewarding hobbies, reentering the dating scene, and so forth, the longer it has been since last time—promoting vicious cycles of deferment. Motivating people to return to activities that enhance their happiness and well-being—experiences they want to have again, and are there for the taking—may be surprisingly difficult.

Marketers frequently style food to look pretty (e.g., in advertising). We investigate how pretty aesthetics (defined by classical aesthetic principles, such as order, symmetry, and balance) influence healthiness judgments. We propose that prettier food is perceived as healthier, specifically because classical aesthetic features make it appear more natural. In a pilot, six main studies, and four replications (total N = 4,301), across unhealthy and healthy, processed and unprocessed, and photographed and real foods alike, people judged prettier (vs. less pretty) versions of the same food as healthier (e.g., more nutrients, less fat), despite equal perceived price. Even given financial stakes, people were misled by prettiness. Supporting the proposed naturalness process, perceived naturalness mediated the effect; belief in a natural=healthy connection moderated it; expressive aesthetics, which do not evoke naturalness, did not produce the effect (despite being pretty); and reminders of artificial modification, which suppress perceived naturalness, mitigated it. Given that pretty food styling can harm consumers by misleading healthiness judgments for unhealthy foods, managers and policy-makers should consider modification disclaimers as a tool to mitigate the pretty=healthy bias.

Behavioral science and machine learning have rapidly progressed in recent years. As there is growing interest among behavioral scholars to leverage machine learning, we present strategies for how these methods can be of value to behavioral scientists using examples centered on behavioral research.