Evan Weingarten

Evan Weingarten
  • Class of 2017

Contact Information

  • office Address:

    700 Jon M. Huntsman Hall
    3730 Walnut Street
    University of Pennsylvania
    Philadelphia, PA 19104

Research Interests: attention and perception, memory

Links: CV

Overview

Evan Weingarten is a fourth-year doctoral student. His research broadly focuses on the effects of memory and attention on consumer decision-making. One research stream shows how affective and cognitive feelings (such as difficulty) accessed during recall influence experiential evaluations. Projects in this stream use both meta-analytical and empirical methods to answer questions such as how these feelings sway judgments, what parts of experiences most strongly affect how people judge them, and how emotions shape willingness to talk with others. A second stream examines how the recency and frequency with which people examine information in a stimulus-based (all relevant information present) decision-making environment affects product evaluations.

Evan graduated from the University of Chicago with a Bachelor of Arts in Economics and Psychology. He joined the Doctoral Program in September 2012.

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Research

  • Evan Weingarten and Jonah Berger (2023), Discussing Proximal Pasts and Far Futures, Journal of Consumer Psychology.
  • Evan Weingarten, Amit Bhattacharjee, Patti Williams (Under Review), So Bad It’s Good: When Consumers Prefer the Bad Option.
  • Evan Weingarten and J. Wesley Hutchinson (Forthcoming), Does Ease Mediate the Ease-of-Retrieval Effect? A Meta-Analysis. Abstract

    A wealth of literature suggests individuals use feelings in addition to facts as sources of information for judgment. This paper focuses on a manipulation in which participants list either a few or many examples of a given type, and then make a judgment. Instead of using the number of arguments or evidence strength, participants are hypothesized to use the subjective ease of generating examples as the primary input to judgment. This result is commonly called the ease-of-retrieval effect, and the feeling of ease is typically assumed to mediate the effect. We use meta-analytic methods across 142 papers, 263 studies, and 582 effect sizes to assess the robustness of the ease-of-retrieval effect, and whether or not the effect is mediated by subjective ease. On average, the standard few/many manipulation exhibits a medium-sized effect. In experimental conditions designed to replicate the standard effect, about one third to one half of the total effect is mediated by subjective ease. This supports the standard explanation, but suggests that other mediators are present. Further, we find evidence of publication bias that reduces the standard effect by up to one-third. We also find that (1) moderator manipulations that differ from the standard manipulation lead to smaller, often reversed effects that are not as strongly mediated by ease, (2) several manipulations of theory-based moderators (e.g., polarized attitudes, misattribution) yield strong theory-consistent effects, (3) method-based moderators have little or no effects on the results, and (4) the mediation results are robust with respect to assumptions about error structure.

  • Evan Weingarten and Jonah Berger (2017), Fired Up for the Future: How Time Shapes Sharing, Journal of Consumer Research.
  • Evan Weingarten, Qijia Chen, Maxwell McAdams, Jessica Yi, Justin Hepler, Dolores Albarracin (2016), From Primed Concepts to Action: A Meta-Analysis of the Behavioral Effects of Incidentally-Presented Words, Psychological Bulletin, 142 (5), pp. 472-497.
  • Kristin Diehl, Evan Weingarten, Gal Zauberman (Under Review), Duration Sensitivity of Key Moments.
  • Evan Weingarten, Sudeep Bhatia, Barbara Mellers (Under Review), Multiple Goals as Reference Points.
  • Evan Weingarten and J. Wesley Hutchinson (Work In Progress), The Effects of Cognitive and Perceptual Salience on Product Valuations.
  • J. Wesley Hutchinson, Tong Lu, Evan Weingarten, “Visual Attention in Consumer Settings”. In International Handbook of Consumer Psychology, edited by Cathrine Janssen-Boyd and Magdalena Zawisza, (:, 2016)
  • Gregory Park, Andrew Schwartz, Maarten Sap, Margaret L Kern, Evan Weingarten, Johannes C Echstaedt, Jonah Berger, David J Stillwell, Michael Kosinski, Lyle Ungar, Martin E Seligman (2016), Living in the Past, Present, and Future: Measuring Temporal Orientation with Language, Journal of Personality.

Awards And Honors

  • Russell Ackoff Doctoral Student Fellowship, Risk Management and Decision Processes Center, 2013

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Latest Research

Evan Weingarten and Jonah Berger (2023), Discussing Proximal Pasts and Far Futures, Journal of Consumer Psychology.
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Awards and Honors

Russell Ackoff Doctoral Student Fellowship, Risk Management and Decision Processes Center 2013
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