Cindy Chan

Who they are

Her university page describes her research as concerned with social relationships, including the roles that experiences, emotions and gifts play in shaping relationships and consumer behaviour. The page says her work has appeared in the Journal of Consumer Research and the Journal of Consumer Psychology, and lists research awards (the Robert Ferber Award and the C.W. Park Best Paper Award) alongside two teaching honours, Professor of the Year as voted by students and a Dean's Merit Award for teaching excellence.

The university page does not state her education or earlier posts. The 2012 press release for the identity paper, issued by the University of Chicago Press Journals, placed her and Jonah Berger at the University of Pennsylvania and Leaf Van Boven at the University of Colorado Boulder. This page records those two statements as they were made and adds nothing to them.

Key papers

Identifiable but not identical (2012), with Berger and Van Boven. The paper reports four studies. Its abstract says consumers simultaneously pursue assimilation and differentiation goals on different dimensions of a single choice. People who want to signal a group identity conform to the group on attributes strongly tied to it, such as brand, especially in identity-relevant categories like clothing. People with a higher need for uniqueness pick less popular options within the range their group is associated with. The study design looks at comparisons between groups and within groups, using choices that vary on several dimensions at once. The abstract as retrieved does not give sample sizes or the participants' backgrounds, so this page does not either.

Experiential gifts foster stronger social relationships than material gifts (2016), with Cassie Mogilner. Published online in December 2016 in the Journal of Consumer Research (volume 43, issue 6, 913 to 931). In experiments with real gift exchanges, recipients reported that experiential gifts, such as events, improved relationships more than material gifts, whether or not giver and recipient consumed the gift together. The paper attributes the benefit to the emotional intensity felt while consuming the gift.

Key ideas

The idea most relevant to this site is that fitting in and standing out are not settled once, at a single midpoint. In the 2012 paper they are pursued at the same time on different attributes of one purchase. In the Princeton eating-club study that Berger describes in his book Invisible Influence, whose notes cite the paper, students dressed like their club and still differed in the details. The article on this site separates what the book reports from what the journal paper's abstract reports, and notes that the car experiment in the book has no citation of its own.

The authors suggest in the press release that the same tension may apply outside shopping, for example to an employee who wants to belong to a team and hold a distinct role. That is a suggestion for further work, not a finding.

This page is short on purpose. The sources read for it were a university page, a press release, and abstract-level records of two papers, and nothing has been added beyond what they state.

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