About

Alicea (Allie) Lieberman is an assistant professor of marketing and behavioral decision making at the UCLA Anderson School of Management. Her research focuses on behavior change with an emphasis on improving individual and societal health and well-being. She examines questions such as how to encourage people to initiate and persist in healthy behaviors—including daily behaviors such as exercise and healthy eating, as well as more intermittent behaviors such as cancer screening. By examining the psychological and motivational processes underlying consumers’ behaviors, she is better able to design interventions that promote positive behavior change. Lieberman’s research has been published in top-tier academic journals such as the Journal of Consumer Research and Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes. She has earned several accolades, including the 2020-21 AMA CBSIG Rising Star Award, recognition as a 2023 MSI Young Scholar, and designation as a 2023-24 Society of Hellman Fellow. Prior to her doctoral studies, she received her master’s in public health and worked evaluating state and federal behavior change marketing campaigns on various health topics. Her current work draws on her experience in behavioral science and public health to improve health and well-being. She earned a BA from The George Washington University, an MPH from The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and a PhD from the University of California, San Diego, where she also served as a postdoctoral scholar.

Research topics

• Psychology
• Computer Science
• Gerontology
• Social psychology
• Microeconomics
• Demography
• Medicine
• Economics
• Communication
• Internal medicine
• Developmental psychology
• Acoustics

Selected publications

• Consumers Believe Legal Products Are Less Effective Than Illegal Products

  Journal of Marketing Research · 2025-03-13 · 1 citations

  article

  This research examines how consumers judge a product's effectiveness based on its legal status. Across eight preregistered experiments, the authors find that consumers tend to believe legal products are less effective than illegal ones. Even when observing identical, objective product outcomes (e.g., equal weight loss from a drug), consumers perceive reduced product benefits from a product described as legal (vs. illegal). The authors test an account of why this belief occurs. When a product is legal, consumers infer that the government allows broad access to it, which they associate with lower product strength. In contrast, illegal products, which consumers presume are harder to access, are viewed as higher in product strength. This strength inference leads consumers to believe a legal product produces both smaller positive effects (lower efficacy) and smaller negative effects (lower harm) than an illegal product. Supporting this theory, the impact of legality on perceived efficacy is eliminated if legal and illegal products are described as equally accessible or equally strong. The authors further demonstrate that these beliefs influence consumer choice. Given the significant health and economic consequences of illegal product consumption, this research has important implications for consumers, marketers, public health professionals, and policy makers.

  PublisherDOI

• The entrenchment effect: Why people persist with less-preferred behaviors

  Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes · 2023-09-01 · 3 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• A voice inside my head: The psychological and behavioral consequences of auditory technologies

  Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes · 2022 · 19 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Psychology
  • Communication
  • Acoustics
  PublisherDOI

• The Unintentional Nonconformist: Habits Promote Resistance to Social influence

  Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin · 2022 · 19 citations

  • Psychology
  • Social psychology
  • Developmental psychology

  This research tests a novel source of resistance to social influence-the automatic repetition of habit. In three experiments, participants with strong habits failed to align their behavior with others. Specifically, participants with strong habits to drink water in a dining hall or snack while working did not mimic others' drinking or eating, whereas those with weak habits conformed. Similarly, participants with strong habits did not shift expectations that they would act in line with descriptive norms, whereas those with weak habits reported more normative behavioral expectations. This habit resistance was not due to a failure to perceive influence: Both strong and weak habit participants' recalled others' behavior accurately, and it was readily accessible. Furthermore, strong habit participants shifted their normative beliefs but not behavior in line with descriptive norms. Thus, habits create behavioral resistance despite people's recognition and acceptance of social influence.

  PublisherDOI

• Perspective neglect: Inadequate perspective taking limits coordination

  Judgment and Decision Making · 2021-07-01 · 2 citations

  articleOpen access

  Abstract People need to take others’ perspectives into account in order to successfully coordinate their actions and optimally allocate limited resources like time, attention, or space. And yet, people often face frequent, but avoidable, coordination failures in the form of wait times, crowding, and unavailability of desirable options. Such poor coordination suggests that the necessary perspective taking (i.e., considering the likely motivations and behavior of others) may be either inadequate or incorrect. The current research suggests that coordination in such situations is frequently unsuccessful, not because people try to take others’ perspectives and are mistaken, but because they neglect to consider those perspectives sufficiently in the first place. Six experiments across a range of limited-resource contexts (e.g., choosing when to visit a store, stream on a limited bandwidth service, go to a popular vacation location, etc.) find that encouraging decision makers to consider what others might do and why they might do it can ameliorate such coordination problems. We further demonstrate a boundary condition: in situations where people’s motivations are inherently obvious, decision makers are naturally able to coordinate without an explicit nudge to perspective take. This research sheds light on a unique class of coordination problems in which people must consider others’ motivations without directly communicating with them, and provides theoretical and practical contributions with the potential to ameliorate common coordination failures.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• The effect of deadlines on cancer screening completion: a randomized controlled trial

  Scientific Reports · 2021 · 15 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Computer Science
  • Medicine
  • Computer Science

  Cancer is the second leading cause of death in the United States. Although screening facilitates prevention and early detection and is one of the most effective approaches to reducing cancer mortality, participation is low-particularly among underserved populations. In a large, preregistered field experiment (n = 7711), we tested whether deadlines-both with and without monetary incentives tied to them-increase colorectal cancer (CRC) screening. We found that all screening invitations with an imposed deadline increased completion, ranging from 2.5% to 7.3% relative to control (ps < .004). Most importantly, individuals who received a short deadline with no incentive were as likely to complete screening (9.7%) as those whose invitation included a deadline coupled with either a small (9.1%) or large declining financial incentive (12.0%; ps = .57 and .04, respectively). These results suggest that merely imposing deadlines-especially short ones-can significantly increase CRC screening completion, and may also have implications for other forms of cancer screening.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Tangential Immersion: Increasing Persistence in Boring Consumer Behaviors

  Journal of Consumer Research · 2021-12-10 · 16 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract Consumers’ lives are filled with myriad behaviors that can be successfully executed with minimal attention. Many such low-attention behaviors benefit from persistence but are often not performed long enough (e.g., hygiene, exercise). The current work examines consumer persistence-failures through an attentional lens. Specifically, drawing on boredom and resource-matching frameworks, we suggest one key driver of poor consumer persistence is that many behaviors demand less attention than consumers have available, leaving excess attention that leads to boredom and premature abandonment. The current research thus proposes an attention-matching framework for persistence and suggests that concurrently performing a task that engages excess attention will improve the match between attentional demands and available resources, thereby increasing persistence. Five experiments across a range of low-attention behaviors (e.g., toothbrushing, coordination exercise) demonstrate that concurrently performing a task that occupies excess attention (e.g., reading, listening), delays boredom and increases persistence. Moreover, two important boundary conditions arise. First, the focal behavior must require minimal attention, leaving excess attention available to attend to the tangential task. Second, the tangential task must engage excess attention without exceeding attentional capacity. This research provides important theoretical and practical contributions, offering the potential to improve consumer well-being by increasing persistence in low-attention behaviors.

  PublisherDOI

• The Illegal = Effective Heuristic

  ACR North American Advances · 2020-01-01

  article
  Publisher

• Psychological Drivers of Behavior Change

  eScholarship (California Digital Library) · 2020-01-01

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  This dissertation comprises three papers examining the psychological drivers of behavior change. Chapter 1 shows how the framing of a policy can harness the power of social norms to motivate behaviors. Chapters 2 and 3 investigate the role of attention in behavioral under- and over-persistence. Chapter 1 examines how the framing of an incentive can influence consumer behaviors. We demonstrate that framing an incentive as a surcharge, compared to a discount, signals that the incentivized behavior is more socially normative, motivating consumers to carry-out the incentivized behavior. Moreover, we show that because surcharges influence behavior by signaling a social norm—and not just through their monetary value—they also increase the likelihood of compliance downstream, even after the incentive is removed.\nChapter 2 investigates why consumers often fail to persist for long enough in beneficial daily behaviors (e.g., exercise, hygiene). Past research commonly views suboptimal persistence as a result of poor self-regulation. We offer a different perspective and propose that because many such behaviors require minimal attention, a mismatch occurs between attentional demands and available resources, causing consumers to experience boredom and stop prematurely. We thus suggest that capturing and sustaining attention in a concurrent task (i.e., tangential immersion) will occupy excess resources, balance this attentional mismatch, and increase persistence. We demonstrate when and why tangential immersion increases persistence across a range of low-attention behaviors, including toothbrushing and strength-building. \nChapter 3 examines contexts in which consumers display the opposite behavior, needlessly persisting in undesirable behaviors and foregoing opportunities to switch to preferred alternatives. We identify a novel underlying cause for this maladaptive behavior: behavioral entrenchment, a state of increasing task set accessibility that arises when performing high-attention repetitive tasks. As entrenchment grows, so does the perceived cost of switching to an alternative, decreasing the likelihood of doing so. However, decreasing both attention to and repetition of the task reduces entrenchment and increases the proportion who make a positive change. Together, these three chapters shed light on important cognitive processes underlying behavior change, ranging from the initiation of a behavior to persistence in the behavior once its begun. \n

  Publisher

• Testing the Role of Motivation and Procrastination in Colorectal Cancer Screening

  ACR North American Advances · 2020-01-01

  article1st authorCorresponding
  Publisher

Frequent coauthors

• Samir Gupta

  Moores Cancer Center

  11 shared

• Mark Koch

  Health Net

  10 shared

• On Amir

  9 shared

• Emily Berry

  8 shared

• Stacie Miller

  8 shared

• Ayelet Gneezy

  University of California, San Diego

  6 shared

• Keith Argenbright

  6 shared

• Bijal A. Balasubramanian

  The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston

  5 shared

Education

• PhD , Marketing

  University of California San Diego Rady School of Management

  2020

• Masters of Public Health , Health Behavior

  University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

  2010

• BA , Elliot School of International Affairs

  George Washington University

  2008

Awards & honors

• 2020-21 AMA CBSIG Rising Star Award
• 2023 MSI Young Scholar
• 2023-24 Society of Hellman Fellow