Questioning the Intuitive Preference for Intentionality: An Abstract

Abstract

This research challenges the longstanding and intuitive preference for intentionality and effort. In it, I explore ways in which consumers, employees, and organizations can actually derive benefit from chance outcomes and unintentional outcomes over and above otherwise identical intentional outcomes. The first set of studies illuminates that consumers prefer hedonic products when a company selects the product for promotion using a chance selection method rather than a traditional intentional selection method due to hedonic perceptions elicited by chance selection. For example, imagine an ice cream company that is promoting one of its flavors for a holiday. Rather than basing its decision on market research, the company chooses which flavor to promote by spinning a wheel of its flavors, which lands on chocolate chip cookie dough. I find that due to hedonic perceptions elicited by chance selection, consumers show heightened preference for this flavor of ice cream relative to the same flavor selected for promotion by more traditional means. The second set of studies reveals that people offer a premium to creations whose inception was unintentional versus otherwise identical creations whose inception was intentional. For example, a person can intend to write a poem, or she can journal her thoughts, only to read them later and realize that without meaning to, she created a poem. I find that unintentionality involved in the inception of a creation results in greater downward counterfactual thought about how the creation may have never been created at all. This, in turn, heightens perceptions that the creation was a product of fate, leading people to prefer such creations and to perceive them as higher quality. The third set of studies identifies a novel strategy to help optimize employee and consumer ideation. These studies illuminate how focusing on a history of one’s unintentional outcomes can promote subsequent ideation by inciting motivation to regain threatened personal control. For example, in a field study, one group of Marketing and Sales employees at a candy company generated a greater number of ideas to promote one of their company’s existing products when they were instructed by their manager to think of times they had to present in front of an audience and it turned out differently than they intended compared to a second group of employees instructed by the manager to think of times they had to present in front of an audience and it turned out as they intended.