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By Nancy Moffitt
Wharton’s Lisa Bolton investigates the connections
between identity, judgment, and consumer behavior.
It was around the time of the Florida election
recounts that Lisa Bolton noticed that no one
seemed to be listening. She saw the emotional
debate, Democrats and Republicans exercised
and red-faced, no one budging an inch. It was
more of the same when the new administration
announced plans to drill for oil in the Arctic
National Wildlife Refuge a short time later—environmentalists in
one camp, Republicans in another. "I was watching it all and thinking,
'No one is changing their mind in all of this. There's no meeting in the middle.'"
Her Wharton marketing colleague Americus Reed, meanwhile,
would often drift into her office, waxing philosophic about the
power of identity—that decisions, consumer and otherwise, are really
all about a person's identity.
Bolton, an assistant professor of marketing, began thinking
about Reed's words, the national political debate, and a host of other
contexts came to mind: Why do so many smokers keep smoking,
despite decades of health warnings? Why do Harley Davidson motorcycles
and Ralph Lauren clothing engender such loyalty among
very specific types of people? Why is it teens and parents always
seem to fight, and never seem to hear what the other is saying?
Four experiments later, Bolton and Reed found some answers
demonstrating that, indeed, judgements that are linked to a person's
identity—from teenager to Republican, environmentalist or businessman—are
virtually immovable, or "sticky." This stickiness—the
tendency for judgements to persevere—is a thread throughout
Bolton's growing body of research, work that is breaking new
ground in both consumer and managerial contexts.
In her most recent research article, to be published in a forth-coming
issue of the Journal of Marketing Research, Bolton addressed
social identity on a very broad level, going beyond new product
attitudes to investigate social and political judgements in a varied
population of participants.
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