Gal Zauberman

Current Projects: Perceived slack and mental representation in choice over time, and Memory protection of hedonic experiences

• Leonard Lee, Michelle Lee, Gal Zauberman (Working), Preference Stability for Time versus Money.
• Jonathan Z. Berman, Amit Bhattacharjee, Deborah Small, Gal Zauberman (2020), Passing the buck to the wealthier: Reference-dependent standards of generosity, Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes. Abstract

  Who is expected to donate to charity, and how much should they give? Intuitively, the less financially constrained
  someone is the more they should give. How then do people evaluate who is constrained and who has
  money to spare? We argue that perceptions of spare money are reference-dependent with respect to one’s current
  self: those who earn more than oneself are perceived as having an abundance of spare money and thus as
  ethically obligated to donate. However, those higher earners themselves report having little to spare, and thus
  apply lower donation standards to themselves. Moreover, a meta-analysis of our file-drawer reveals an asymmetry:
  individuals overestimate the spare money of higher earners but estimate the scant spare money of lower
  earners more accurately. Across all incomes assessed, people “pass the buck” to wealthier others (or to their
  future wealthier selves), who in turn, “pass the buck” to even wealthier others.

• Alixandra Barasch, Kristin Diehl, Jackie Silverman, Gal Zauberman (2017), Photographic Memory: The Effects of Photo-taking on Memory for Auditory and Visual Information, Psychological Science. Abstract

  How does volitional photo taking affect unaided memory for visual and auditory aspects of experiences? Across one field and three lab studies, we found that, even without revisiting any photos, participants who could freely take photographs during an experience recognized more of what they saw and less of what they heard, compared with those who could not take any photographs. Further, merely taking mental photos had similar effects on memory. These results provide support for the idea that photo taking induces a shift in attention toward visual aspects and away from auditory aspects of an experience. Additional findings were in line with this mechanism: Participants with a camera had better recognition of aspects of the scene that they photographed than of aspects they did not photograph. Furthermore, participants who used a camera during their experience recognized even nonphotographed aspects better than participants without a camera did. Meta-analyses including all reported studies support these findings.

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  Links

  Supplementary Material
• Nicole Cooper, Kable W Joseph, B. Kyu Kim, Gal Zauberman (2013), Brain Activity in Valuation Regions while Thinking about the Future Predicts Individual Discount Rates, The Journal of Neuroscience. Abstract
  People vary widely in how much they discount delayed rewards, yet little is known about the sources of these differences. Here we

  demonstrate that neural activity in ventromedial prefrontal cortex (VMPFC) and ventral striatum (VS) when human subjects are asked

  to merely think about the future—specifically, to judge the subjective length of future time intervals—predicts delay discounting. High

  discounters showed lower activity for longer time delays, while low discounters showed the opposite pattern. Our results demonstrate

  that the correlation betweenVMPFCandVSactivity and discounting occurs even in the absence of choices about future rewards, and does

  not depend on a person explicitly evaluating future outcomes or judging their self-relevance. This suggests a link between discounting

  and basic processes involved in thinking about the future, such as temporal perception. Our results also suggest that reducing impatience

  requires not suppression of VMPFC and VS activity altogether, but rather modulation of how these regions respond to the present versus

  the future.
• B. Kyu Kim and Gal Zauberman (2013), Can Victoria’s Secret Change the Future? A Subjective Time Perception Account of Sexual-Cue Effects on Impatience. Vol 142 (2), 328-335, Journal of Experimental Psychology. Abstract
  Sexual cues influence decisions not only about sex, but also about unrelated outcomes such as money.

  In the presence of sexual cues, individuals are more impatient when making intertemporal monetary

  tradeoffs, choosing smaller immediate amounts over larger delayed amounts. Previous research has

  emphasized the power of sexual cues to induce a strong general psychological desire to obtain not only

  sex-related but all available rewards. In the case of money, that heightened appetite enhances the

  perceived value of immediate monetary rewards. We propose a different psychological mechanism to

  explain this effect: Sexual cues induce impatience through their ability to lengthen the perceived temporal

  distance to delayed rewards. That is, sexual cues make the temporal delay seem subjectively longer,

  resulting in greater impatience for monetary rewards. We attribute this process to the arousing nature of

  sexual cues, thus extending findings on arousal and overestimation of elapsed time to the domain of

  future time perception and intertemporal preferences.

  Keywords: sexual arousal, time discounting, impatience, time perception

  Supplemental materials: http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/a0028954.supp
• Robert Meyer, Joachim Vosgerau, Vishal Singh, Joel Urbany, Gal Zauberman, Michael Norton, Tony Cui, Brian Ratchford, Alessandro Acquisiti, David Bell, Barbara E. Kahn (2013), Behavioral Research and Empirical Modeling of Marketing Channels: Implications for Both Fields and a Call for Future Research, Marketing Letters, 21 (), pp. 301-315. Abstract
  Game theoretic models of marketing channels typically rely on simplifying

  assumptions that, from a behavioral perspective, often appear naïve. However,

  behavioral researchers have produced such an abundance of behavioral regularities that

  they are impossible to incorporate into game theoretic models. We believe that a focus

  on three core findings would benefit both fields; these are: first, beliefs that are held by

  the various players regarding profit consequences of different actions are incomplete and

  often biased; second, players’ preferences and optimization objectives are not

  commonly known; and third, players have insufficient cognitive abilities to achieve

  optimization objectives. Embracing these three findings shifts the focus from rational

  decision making to how decision makers learn to improve their decision-making skills.

  Concluding, we believe that greater convergence of game theoretic modeling and

  behavioral research in marketing channels would lead to new insights for both fields.
• B. Kyu Kim, Gal Zauberman, James R. Bettman (2012), Space, Time, and Intertemporal Preferences, Journal of Consumer Research, Inc.. Abstract
  Although subjective judgment of future time plays an important role in a variety of

  decisions, little is known about the factors that influence such judgments and their

  implications. Based on a time as distance metaphor and its associated conceptual

  mapping between space and time, this article demonstrates that spatial distance

  influences judgment of future time. Participants who consider a longer spatial distance

  judge the same future time to be longer than those considering a shorter

  distance. Intertemporal preferences, for which judgment of future delays is a critical

  factor, also shift with consideration of spatial distance: participants who consider

  a longer spatial distance also reveal a greater degree of impatience in intertemporal

  decisions as they perceive a longer delay to future rewards. The current findings

  support the importance of subjective judgment of future time in intertemporal preferences

  by introducing a factor that changes time perception without directly changing

  the value of outcomes.
• Min Zhao, Steve Hoeffler, Gal Zauberman (2011), Mental Stimulation and Product Evaluation: The Affective and Cognitive Dimensions of Process Versus Outcome Simulation, Journal of Marketing Research, XLVIII (), pp. 827-839. Abstract
  in this research, the authors examine the role of process versus

  outcome simulation in product evaluation and demonstrate how

  manipulating the type of information-processing mode (cognitive vs.

  affective) leads to unique effects in process and outcome simulation. the

  article begins with the premise that when consumers do not have wellformed

  preferences for a product, they tend to focus on the usage

  process. the authors predict and find that outcome simulation is more

  effective than process simulation in increasing product evaluation under

  a cognitive mode, whereas process simulation is more effective than

  outcome simulation under an affective mode. establishing boundary

  conditions, the authors further show the effect of two important

  moderators that alter consumers’ focus on/away from the product’s

  usage process. Specifically, they show a reversal of the effect for each

  type of mental simulation for hedonic products, for which product

  benefits are the more salient aspect (vs. the usage process).

  furthermore, a distant-future (vs. near-future) evaluation frame shifts

  people’s focus away from the usage process toward product benefits and

  reverses the effect of each type of simulation. the authors conclude with

  a discussion of theoretical and managerial implications.
• J. Wesley Hutchinson, Gal Zauberman, Robert Meyer (2010), On the Interpretation of Temporal Inflation Parameters in Stochastic Models of Judgment and Choice, Marketing Science, 29 (1), pp. 133-139. Abstract

  The implications of Salisbury and Feinberg’s (2010) paper [Salisbury, L. C, R M. Feinberg. 2010. Alleviating the constant stochastic variance assumption in decision research: Theory, measurement, and experimental test. Marketing Sci. 29(1) 1-17] for the process of model development and testing in the field of intertemporal choice analysis is explored. Although supporting the overall thrust of Salisbury and Feinberg’s critique of previous empirical work in the area, we also see their paper as illustrating the dangers of drawing strong inferences about the behavioral interpretation of statistical model parameters without seeking convergent empirical evidence. In particular, we are skeptical about the extent to which the reported effects of temporal distance on the estimated scale parameter, ?_c, are uniquely, or even primarily, due to unobserved error inflation that reflects consumer’s uncertainty about future utility. This interpretation is brought into question by several lines of reasoning. Conceptually, we note that "uncertainty" is different from "error" and that, for choice data, the error inflation model is mathematically identical to a model in which the scale parameter is a deterministic function of the temporal discount rate. Empirically, a reanalysis of data from previously published experiments does not consistently support temporal error inflation, temporal convergence of choice shares, or the scale parameter as an explanation of variety seeking in choice sequences. In our opinion, the cumulative results of research on intertemporal choice require models in which the attributes of choice alternatives are differentially discounted over time. Despite these findings, we advocate that choice researchers should indeed follow Salisbury and Feinberg’s advice to not assume that error variances will be unaffected by experimental manipulations, and such effects should be explicitly modeled. We also agree that uncovering effects on error variance is just the first step, and the ultimate goal should be to rigorously explain the reasons for such effects.

• Gal Zauberman, Jonathan Levav, Kristin Diehl, Rajesh Bhargave (2010), 1995 Feels so Close Yet so Far: The Effect of Event Markers on the Subjective Feeling of Elapsed Time, Psychological Science, 21(1), 133-139. Abstract

  Why does an event feel more or less distant than another event that occurred around the same time? Prior research suggests that characteristics of an event itself can affect the estimated date of its occurrence. Our work differs in that we focused on how characteristics of the time interval following an event affect people’s feelings of elapsed time (i.e., their feelings of how distant an event seems). We argue that a time interval that is punctuated by a greater number of accessible intervening events related to the target event (event markers) will make the target event feel more distant, but that unrelated intervening events will not have this effect. In three studies, we found support for the systematic effect of event markers. The effect of markers was independent of other characteristics of the event, such as its memorability, emotionality, importance, and estimated date, a result suggesting that this effect is distinct from established dating biases.

Past Courses

• MKTG8990 - Independent Study

  A student contemplating an independent study project must first find a faculty member who agrees to supervise and approve the student's written proposal as an independent study (MKTG 899). If a student wishes the proposed work to be used to meet the ASP requirement, he/she should then submit the approved proposal to the MBA adviser who will determine if it is an appropriate substitute. Such substitutions will only be approved prior to the beginning of the semester.

• PSYC4998 - Mentored Research

  Mentored research involving data collection. Students do independent empirical work under the supervision of a faculty member, leading to a written paper. Normally taken in the junior or senior year.

• PSYC4999 - Honors Mentored Research

  The Honors Program has been developed to recognize excellence in psychology among Penn undergraduates and to enhance skills related to psychological research. The 4998 credit signifies an Honors Independent Study, completed as part of the Honors Program. The honors program involves: (a) completing a year-long empirical research project in your senior year under the supervision of a faculty member (for a letter grade). This earns 2 cu's. (b) completing a second term of statistics (for a letter grade) before graduation. (c) participating in the year-long Senior Honors seminar (for a letter grade). This seminar is designed especially for Psychology Honors majors; this receives a total of 1 cu. (d) participating in the Undergraduate Psychology Research Fair in the Spring semester, at which honors students present a poster and give a 15-minute talk about their research. (e) a total of 15 cu's in psychology is required. Students will be selected to be part of the Honors Program in the Spring of their junior year (see application process online)

• PSYC6999 - Indiv Res for 1st Yr Grd

  Individual Research for First-Year Graduate Students

• Paul E. Green Award, 2010
• Early Career Award for Distinguished Contributions to Consumer Psychology, 2007 Description

  Society for Consumer Psychology (American Psychological Association, Division 23).

• MSI - Young Scholars Program, 2005 Description

  Marketing Science Institute

• Robert Ferber Award, Honorable Mention, 2004 Description

  Association of Consumer Research

• Recognition of Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching, 2004 Description

  Kenan-Flagler Business School, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

• R.J. Reynolds Fund Award - Junior Faculty Development Award, 2003 Description

  The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Junior Faculty Development Award.

• AMA-Sheth Foundation Doctoral Consortium Fellow, 1998
• Highest Honors in Psychology, 1994 Description

  The University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

• Phi Beta Kappa, 1994 Description

  National Honor Society

• Time Management, NPR Radio, WHYY - Radio Times - 01/15/2010
• Where Did the Time Go? Do Not Ask the Brain, New York Times - 01/04/2010
• Carpe Diem? Maybe Tomorrow, New York Times - 12/28/2009
• Future Shock Concept Gets a Personal Twist, New York Times - 02/22/2005

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