Gal Zauberman

Professor of Marketing. Yale SOM

Contact Information

Primary Email:
gal.zauberman@yale.edu

office Address:
Yale School of Management
New Haven, CT 06511
New Haven, CT 06511

Research Interests: consumer behavior, consumer financial decision making, experiences over time, judgment and decision-making, memory and choice, time and decisions

Links: CV, Personal Website

Overview

Professor Gal Zauberman studies consumer behavior, time in judgment and decision making, and memory for emotions and choice. In his research, Professor Zauberman focuses on factors that affect individuals’ evaluations, preferences, and choice, with specific interest in the role of time in judgment and decision making. On this topic, Zauberman examines the psychological mechanisms that govern the way people develop preferences for outcomes in the future. He also studies how the pattern of a sequence of outcomes over time affects people’s evaluation of a consumption sequence. More recently, he began work on how people evaluate forthcoming activities and how these activities affect their special memories for past events. The key idea is that people choose activities not just because of their immediate enjoyment, but because of how they relate to previous special memories.

Professor Zauberman’s research has been published in top-tier academic journals including the Journal of Consumer Research, Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, the Journal of Marketing Research, Management Science, and Psychological Science. His work received international media coverage, including the New York Times, Scientific American, and others. He has won several awards and honors, among them the Early Career Award for Distinguished Contributions to Consumer Psychology, Young Scholars Program of the Marketing Science Institute and an honorable mention for the Association of Consumer Research’s Robert Ferber Award. His teaching interests include courses in Consumer Behavior, Internet Marketing, Marketing Management and Marketing Research.

Professor Zauberman received his PhD in Marketing from Duke University (2000) and his B.A. in Economics and Psychology from The University of North Carolina, Chapel-Hill (1994). He is also a member of the graduate faculty of the Psychology Department at Penn.

Research

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.

Related
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.

Awards And Honors

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