Abstract

for their comments on earlier drafts. We are indebted to Suchi Chandran for her assistance at various stages of this project, and to Manoj Thomas for his assistance in data collection. Special thanks are due to Kalpana Suresh for painstakingly helping with data entry. Finally, we would like to acknowledge the invaluable input and guidance provided to us by the late JMR Editor, Dick Wittink; we also thank the Guest Editor, Baba Shiv, and three anonymous reviewers for their extremely constructive comments. Time-varying Effects of Chronic Hedonic Goals on Impulsive Behavior Marketers and academic scholars have long been interested in understanding what drives impulsive behavior, and have focused on what causes a person to indulge. The three experiments reported in this paper examine reasons that underlie urges that strengthen over time and cause people to over-indulge from a goal-theoretic view of impulsiveness. The authors demonstrate that impulsivity is characterized by generalized reward sensitivity as well as by an activation of chronic goals to seek pleasure in various domains (experiment 1). Further, through a moment-to-moment tracking of desires, the authors demonstrate that such chronic goals, particularly in conjunction with temporarily primed goals, provide the momentum for impulsive people to override their self-control goals, leading to a strengthening of desires over time (experiment 2). In turn, this causes impulsive people to behave even more impulsively when their activated hedonic goals are not satiated (experiment 3). Findings suggest that contextual cues have powerful influences on impulsive behavior over time when acting in conjunction with chronic hedonic goals, and have public policy implications for behaviors such as binge drinking and unrestrained eating. Most people believe that they are capable of controlling their impulses and desires. Yet, we hear statistics such as 44.4% of students in undergraduate colleges across the country indulge in binge drinking (Wechsler et al. 2002). Further, the incidence of over-eating and obesity is considerably high, with 30.9% classified as obese among Americans 20-74 years of age THEORETICAL BACKGROUND Impulsive behavior has been studied in a variety of domains such as shopping, gambling, eating, drinking and sex (see Baumeister, Heatherton and Tice 1994 for a review). A variety of views have emerged from the literature on the mental processes underlying such behavior. Proponents of 4 the cognitive view suggest that impulsive behavior arises from a tendency to over-value benefits and undervalue long-term consequences (e.g., An alternative view of impulsive behavior stresses the interplay between the affective and the cognitive systems While all these accounts have largely focused on single indulgence instances, they do not address why some individuals over-indulge over time by going on shopping splurges or eating excessively. In other words, what might be the qualitative differences in the mental processes for a person who succumbs to the occasional temptation and one who can't resist piling up multiple scoops of ice-cream from the tub in the refrigerator? How soon do people succumb to such temptations? What happens to self-control in the process? In order to understand this, we draw from recent evidence on how desires are created (see Thus, the spontaneous affect or "hot cognitions" described earlier do not just represent immediate reactions, but also map onto pleasure-seeking goals (Shiv and Fedorikhin 2002). Recent neurobiological evidence suggests that such desires are directly linked to the activation of a particular neuromodulator, namely, dopamine Based on this evidence, we propose that impulsive behavior is driven by hedonic or pleasure-seeking goals that may cause a person to experience desires for related objects or products. Consistent with goal theory, such goals may also strengthen over time Importantly, such goals may conflict with other goals such as to be frugal or to stay healthy and cause intense ambivalence. Such conflicting goals are part of control processes that may ordinarily over-ride temporary urges (Hoch and Loewenstein 1991). We argue that differences in behavior are borne out of the relative chronicity of the two goals. Impulsive individuals have stronger and chronic hedonic goals and weaker self-control goals, while prudent individuals are likely to have stronger self-control goals and weaker hedonic goals. Ultimately, therefore, behavior over time is determined by the relative strengths of an activated hedonic goal that is rising in surgency and that of the goal to remain in control or be prudent. Our key point of departure from the previous literature on impulsive behavior is thus in the dynamics of the underlying processes. Specifically, we are not only concerned about what happens immediately after someone sees something tempting, but also about what happens when a desire has been activated and continues to linger on within the individual. None of the extant literature on impulsive behavior makes this distinction. We now turn to a discussion of individual differences in these hedonic goals.