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The purpose of this study is to examine whether sensitizing people to their pain (through an affective pain prime) is qualitatively different from inducing sadness (through mood induction) and will lead to different effects on experienced sadness and participant’s subsequent willingness to pay. Previous research has found that inducing sadness, using a mood induction task (video + self-focused writing exercise), led to a positive effect on willingness to pay (WTP): the sadder participants the higher their WTP (Cryder et al. 2008). In our previous study (Exp 2, Mazar et al.) we conceptually primed affective pain through a scrambled-sentences task that included words related to sadness (i.e., social exclusion and heartbreak). We found the opposite pattern of results on WTP than Cryder et al. (2008): In a subsequent purchasing task, people conceptually primed with affective pain words had a significantly lower WTP for a product than those in a control group. We found no effects of our conceptual priming task on participants’ “current” aggregated mood and arousal. These results suggest that our priming task made participants more sensitive to affective pain (e.g., their pain of paying) rather than feeling actual pain and thus reduced their WTP. In this study, we will directly test our conceptual affective pain priming manipulation against the sadness mood induction task using manipulation checks from Dorison et al. (PNAS 2020) to replicate our previous findings and support the notion that feeling sad has not the same impact on purchasing behavior as conceptually priming people using our affective pain manipulation.

Supplemental Material, sj-pdf-1-jmx-10.1177_0022242921990070 for Increasing Organ Donor Registrations with Behavioral Interventions: A Field Experiment by Nicole Robitaille, Nina Mazar, Claire I. Tsai, Avery M. Haviv and Elizabeth Hardy in Journal of Marketing