Published Research

Winet, Y. K. and Ed O’Brien (forthcoming), “Familiarity Seeking: Growing and Learning From Repeat Experiences,” in Handbook of the Science of Existential Psychology, ed. Kenneth E. Vail, Daryl Van Tongeren, Rebecca J. Schlegel, Jeff Greenberg, Laura A. King, and Richard M. Ryan, New York: Guilford Press.

The literature on meaning and personal growth has pointed to the obvious value of gaining exposure to new experiences, but what is perhaps less obvious is that meaning and personal growth can also be gained from repeat consumption of familiar stimuli and re-living familiar experiences. For example, people often choose to rewatch the same television shows and movies and plays, listen to the same songs again and again, go to the same cafés and bars every weekend, and reread the same cherished books multiple times throughout their lives. This chapter characterizes the construct of repeat consumption and argues that it is actually not as repetitive as one might think. Just as one can peel back an onion to reveal hidden layers, repeat consumption can lead to deeper appreciation of the meaningful and hedonic aspects of experiences. Repeat consumption creates opportunities to build a relationship with an experience, grasp the experiential value it has to offer, and notice features that previously went unnoticed. Repetition can reveal new things about experiences themselves (stimulus-level novelty), such as when people rewatch an epic movie trilogy and notice details or story plot connections they missed the first time (or have since forgotten about), and about oneself in the process (self-level novelty), shaping identity-relevant self-concepts (as it, e.g., signals something to the consumer about their deeper beliefs and values; “I must really like this; this is me”). This chapter reviews theoretical foundations and the growing literature on repeat consumption, and highlights future directions for research.

Winet, Y. K. and Ed O’Brien (2023), “Ending on a familiar note: Perceived endings motivate repeat consumption,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 124 (4), 707-734.

People fill their free time by choosing between hedonic activities that are new and exciting (e.g., exploring a buzzed-about restaurant) versus old and familiar (e.g., revisiting the same old spot). The dominant psychological assumption is that, holding constant factors like cost, availability, and convenience between acquiring such options, people will prefer novelty (“variety is the spice of life”). Eight preregistered experiments (total N = 5,889) reveal that people’s attraction to novelty depends, at least in part, on their temporal context—namely, on perceived endings. As participants faced a shrinking window of opportunity to enjoy a general category of experience (even merely temporarily; e.g., eating one’s last dessert before starting a diet), their hedonic preferences shifted away from new and exciting options and toward old favorites. This relative shift emerged across many domains (e.g., food, travel, music), situations (e.g., impending New Year’s resolutions, COVID-19 shut-downs), and consequential behaviors (e.g., choices with financial stakes). Using both moderation and mediation approaches, we found that perceived endings increase familiarity preferences because they increase people’s desire to ensure a personally meaningful experience on which to end, which returns to old favorites generally provide more than exploring novelty does. Endings increased participants’ preferences for old favorites even when it meant sacrificing other desirable attributes (e.g., exciting stimulation). Together, these findings advance and bridge research on hedonic preferences, time and timing, and the motivational effects of change. Variety may be the “spice of life,” but familiarity may be the spice of life’s endings.

Davenport, Diag and Yuji K. Winet (2022), “Pivotal voting: The opportunity to tip group decisions skews juries and other voting outcomes,” Proceedings National Academy of Sciences, 119 (32).

Many important social and policy decisions are made by small groups of people (e.g., juries, college admissions officers, corporate boards) with the hope that a collective process will yield better and fairer decisions. In many instances, it is possible for these groups to fail to reach a decision by not garnering a minimum number of votes (e.g., hung juries). Our research finds that pivotal voters vote to avoid such decision failure—voters who can “tip” their group into a punishment decision will be more likely to do so. This effect is distinct from well-known social pressures to simply conform with others or reach unanimity. Using observational data from Louisiana court cases, we find a sharp discontinuity in juries’ voting decisions at the threshold between indecision and conviction (Study 1). In a third-party punishment paradigm, pivotal voters were more likely to vote to punish a target than non-pivotal voters, even when holding social information constant (Study 2), and adopted harsher views about the target's deservingness of punishment (Study 3). Using vignettes, we find that pivotal voters are judged to be differentially responsible for the outcomes of their votes—those who ‘block’ the group from reaching a punishment decision are deemed more responsible for the outcome than those who “fall in line” (Study 4). These findings provide insight into how we might improve group decision-making environments to ensure that their outcomes accurately reflect group members’ actual beliefs and not the influence of social pressures.

Winet, Y. K.*, Yanping Tu*, Shoham Choshen-Hillel, and Ayelet Fishbach (2022), “Social exploration: When people deviate from options explored by others,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 122 (3), 427-442.

People often face choices between known options and unknown ones. Our research documents a social-exploration effect: People are more likely to explore unknown options when they learn about known options from other people’s experiences. Across four studies (N = 2,333), we used an incentive-compatible paradigm where participants chose between known and unknown options (e.g., cash bonuses). We found higher exploration rates (i.e., choosing of unknown options) when information about known options came from other people, compared with an unidentified source (Study 1a) or a computer (Studies 1b–4). We theorize that the social-exploration effect results from people’s tendency to intuitively adopt a group-level perspective with other people: a “we”-perspective. Thus, in social contexts, people explore more to diversify their experience as a group. Supporting this account, we find the effect attenuates in exploration of losses, where people do not wish to adopt a group-level perspective of others’ losses (Study 2). Furthermore, the effect is obtained only if others have experienced the outcome; not when they only revealed its content (Study 3). Finally, the social-exploration effect generalizes to everyday choices, such as choosing a movie to watch (Study 4). Taken together, these findings highlight the social aspect of individual exploration decisions and offer practical implications for how to encourage exploration.

*Joint first authorship

Working Papers

Winet, Yuji K. and Ed O’Brien (in preparation for Journal of Consumer Research), “Refreshing the Familiar: Consumers Prefer Experiences With Callbacks”

Consumers constantly face choices between new and old experiences, yet the perception of novelty and familiarity changes dynamically as consumers go through experiences. Might consumers prefer novel and familiar moments to intermingle in particular ways within experiences? Across nine experiments, this research proposes that one such pattern—the callback structure—is an especially rewarding pattern for consumer experiences. Callbacks lead to more positive evaluations (e.g., higher star ratings, more enjoyment, and an increased sense of meaning) and downstream marketing outcomes (e.g., improved brand recall, higher willingness-to-pay, and increased likelihood of sharing via word of mouth). Moreover, two field studies reveal how callbacks improve consumer experiences at granular and holistic levels (e.g., audiences laugh longer at comedians’ jokes, and films receive higher IMDB scores). Using both mediation and moderation approaches, we found that the benefits of callbacks stem from their ability to provide a sense of closure, which, in turn, increases the perception of being guided effectively through the experience. These findings advance research on novelty and familiarity seeking, the psychology of meaning, and experiential consumption by demonstrating the power of infusing familiar experiences with new meaning.

Banerjee, Akshina and Yuji K. Winet (in preparation for Journal of Consumer Research), “Asymmetrical Variety Seeking in Hierarchical Choice”

How might preferences for variety change when choices are nested within other choices (e.g., choosing a dish at a given restaurant vs. choosing the restaurant)? We consider whether navigating options at multiple levels of hierarchical choice predicts diverging preferences for variety. Specifically, across five main experiments (N = 1,361), we test whether consumers prefer more variety at higher hierarchical levels (e.g., restaurants) and less variety at lower hierarchical levels (e.g., dishes). We find that consumers prefer more variety at higher levels than lower levels across time in a hypothetical restaurant scenario (Study 1), and across other hedonic domains (e.g., spas, hotels, comedy shows; Study 2). This effect could not be fully explained by a potential sequence effect—a natural tendency to choose higher-level options before lower-level ones. When forced to choose lower-level options first, consumers continued to prefer greater variety among higher-level options (Study 3). Consumers preferred more variety at higher levels even when they chose from familiar higher-level (i.e., restaurant) options generated by the consumers themselves, suggesting that differential familiarity with options at different hierarchical levels also could not explain the effect. (Study 4). Furthermore, this preference asymmetry is resistant to spillover effects—restricting options at a higher level of choice did not influence preferences for variety at a lower level of choice (Study 5). In total, these findings shed light on a novel framework for understanding how consumers’ variety preferences differ across different types of choices.