Panel: Consumer mindlessness

Since a seminal article by Langer, Blank & Chanowitz in 1978, there has been great interest in the `mindlessness of ostensibly thoughtful action.' Behaviors appearing to result from conscious, thoughtful processing, may actually be the result of expectations developed from previous actions and mindless re-enactments of a recalled sequence. One previously performed a behavior with a favorable outcome, and then formed a `script' for future behaviors which could be re-enacted without mindful information processing. Mindlessness has been frequently reported in both the psychological and marketing literature. As an example Pettit-O'Malley & Williams found that many consumers mindlessly redeem grocery coupons without reflecting on the magnitude of savings. That is, consumers were shown to redeem bogus coupons (savings of <1%) as regularly as those with significant savings when both regular and `sale' prices were printed on the coupons. Also, presumed savings from both coupon-type redeemers were equivalent. Their study generated further interest in consumer mindlessness at Decision Sciences Institute, which led to the current panel.