Browsing by Author "Fedorikhin, Alexander"

Now showing 1 - 2 of 2
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Consumer responses to hedonic food products: Healthy cake or indulgent cake? Could dialecticism be the answer?
    (Elsevier, 2018-10) Jakubanecs, Alex; Fedorikhin, Alexander; Iversen, Nina M.; Kelley School of Business - Indianapolis
    Marketing of indulgent food products with healthy claims (e.g., healthy cake) is challenging, and studies explaining consumer responses to such products are limited. This research addresses this limitation by focusing on an unexamined driver of responses to vice food products marketed as more healthy—dialectical thinking. Three experimental studies using samples from online panels show that dialecticism has a positive effect on consumers' evaluations of such products when primed within a predominantly non-dialectical culture, across cultures with different levels of dialecticism, and as an individual difference. In all three studies experienced discomfort mediates this effect. This research contributes to extant literature by (1) identifying the role of dialecticism in mitigating consumers' aversion to vice food products with healthy claims, (2) confirming the effects of dialecticism at both cultural and individual levels, and (3) highlighting the managerial relevance of dialecticism.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Human emotions toward stimuli in the uncanny valley: laddering and index construction
    (2015) Ho, Chin-Chang; MacDorman, Karl F.; Pfaff, Mark S.; Fedorikhin, Alexander; Huang, Edgar
    Human-looking computer interfaces, including humanoid robots and animated humans, may elicit in their users eerie feelings. This effect, often called the uncanny valley, emphasizes our heightened ability to distinguish between the human and merely humanlike using both perceptual and cognitive approaches. Although reactions to uncanny characters are captured more accurately with emotional descriptors (e.g., eerie and creepy) than with cognitive descriptors (e.g., strange), and although previous studies suggest the psychological processes underlying the uncanny valley are more perceptual and emotional than cognitive, the deep roots of the concept of humanness imply the application of category boundaries and cognitive dissonance in distinguishing among robots, androids, and humans. First, laddering interviews (N = 30) revealed firm boundaries among participants’ concepts of animated, robotic, and human. Participants associated human traits like soul, imperfect, or intended exclusively with humans, and they simultaneously devalued the autonomous accomplishments of robots (e.g., simple task, limited ability, or controlled). Jerky movement and humanlike appearance were associated with robots, even though the presented robotic stimuli were humanlike. The facial expressions perceived in robots as improper were perceived in animated characters as mismatched. Second, association model testing indicated that the independent evaluation based on the developed indices is a viable quantitative technique for the laddering interview. Third, from the interviews several candidate items for the eeriness index were validated in a large representative survey (N = 1,311). The improved eeriness index is nearly orthogonal to perceived humanness (r = .04). The improved indices facilitate plotting relations among rated characters of varying human likeness, enhancing perspectives on humanlike robot design and animation creation.