Chip Heath

Chip Heath

Professor at Stanford and co-author, with Jonah Berger, of the research on why people abandon tastes when the wrong group adopts them, including the yellow wristband field study.

Who they are

In Invisible Influence, Berger writes that "Stanford professor Chip Heath and I got into the wristband business", describing a study in which students abandoned charity wristbands after a dormitory they saw as geeky began wearing them. The work was published in 2008 in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, following a 2007 paper by the same pair in the Journal of Consumer Research.

Key papers

Berger, J., & Heath, C. (2008). "Who drives divergence? Identity signaling, outgroup dissimilarity, and the abandonment of cultural tastes." Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 95(3), 593-607. doi:10.1037/0022-3514.95.3.593.

Berger, J., & Heath, C. (2007). "Where consumers diverge from others: identity signaling and product domains." Journal of Consumer Research, 34(2), 121-134.

Key ideas

Visible choices are read as identity claims, so people diverge from tastes taken up by groups they do not want to be confused with. See Identity Signaling.

Sources

  1. Berger, J. (2016). Invisible Influence. Simon & Schuster. p. 113. Berger & Heath (2008), citation verified.