About

Dr. James R. Bettman is the Burlington Industries Professor Emeritus of Business Administration and a member of the marketing area at the Fuqua School of Business at Duke University. He also holds a position as Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience at Duke University. He received his BA in mathematics-economics and his PhD in administrative sciences from Yale University. Prior to his appointment at Duke, he was on the faculty at UCLA. Professor Bettman’s teaching interests are in consumer behavior, and his research focuses on consumer information processing and decision making. His work explores constructive preferences, how decision makers adapt to different situations, the effects of emotion and stress on decision making, the role of non-conscious processes in consumer behavior, and how consumption is used in forming identities. He has authored two books, 'An Information Processing Theory of Consumer Choice' and 'The Adaptive Decision Maker,' as well as a monograph titled 'Emotional Decisions: Tradeoff Difficulty and Coping in Consumer Choice.' His research has resulted in over 120 publications appearing in journals across marketing, consumer research, psychology, management, and neuroscience. Professor Bettman has served on the editorial review boards for several prominent journals, including the Journal of Consumer Research, Journal of Marketing Research, and Journal of Consumer Psychology. He is an associate editor for the Journal of Marketing Research and has previously served as co-editor for the Journal of Consumer Research and editor of Monographs of the Journal of Consumer Research. Recognized for his teaching and mentorship, he received the Duke University Dean’s Award for Excellence in Mentoring in 2006, the NCNB Faculty Award for the Fuqua School, and was named the Duke University Scholar/Teacher of the Year. He has chaired or co-chaired forty PhD committees at Fuqua and UCLA. A Fellow of the American Psychological Association, the American Psychological Society, and the Association for Consumer Research, he has received numerous awards including the Converse Award, the AMA/Irwin/McGraw-Hill Distinguished Marketing Educator Award, the Consumer Behavior Special Interest Group Lifetime Achievement Award, and the William F. O’Dell Award from the American Marketing Association. Additionally, he has shared his expertise through testimony before the Federal Trade Commission, advice to the US Court, Central District of California, and collaborations with various companies.

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Sociology
• Psychology
• Social Science
• Artificial Intelligence
• Social psychology
• Business
• Marketing
• Management science
• Economics
• Microeconomics
• Communication
• Advertising

Selected publications

• Product‐facilitated conversations: When does starting a conversation by mentioning a product lead to better conversational outcomes?

  Journal of Consumer Psychology · 2023 · 1 citations

  • Computer Science
  • Psychology
  • Advertising

  Abstract This paper examines product‐facilitated conversations . In three studies, we show that the products consumers publicly display influence how other consumers start conversations with them and how enjoyable and self‐disclosing these conversations are. Study 1 is an experiment in the field that shows that product‐facilitated conversations are deeper and more enjoyable than non‐product‐facilitated ones. Study 2 examines the characteristics of products that, when mentioned, lead to good conversations and identifies uniqueness and commonality as key characteristics. Study 3 is an additional experiment in the field that tests these characteristics and shows that products with those characteristics are better conversation starters than the weather. Overall, these studies show novel social benefits to talking about products and generate new ideas about how talking about products can help consumers meet new people, smooth awkward social situations, and build relationships.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Celebrate Good Times: How Celebrations Increase Perceived Social Support

  Journal of Public Policy & Marketing · 2022 · 6 citations

  • Sociology
  • Social psychology
  • Psychology

  Despite the ubiquity of celebrations in everyday life, little is known about how celebrations may contribute to consumer well-being. In the current work, the authors propose that celebrations promote perceived social support, which prior work has conceptualized as the belief that others will be there for you for future negative life events. The authors further theorize that celebrations require three key characteristics that, in combination, are necessary for increasing perceived social support. Specifically, celebrations must (1) mark an individual's separate positive event and (2) involve consumption (3) with others (i.e., social). They test this theory across eight studies and demonstrate a process mechanism for this effect: these characteristics lead to increases in enacted support and perceived responsiveness, which in turn lead to increases in more general perceived social support. They then extend these findings by investigating virtually held celebrations, the individual's role at the celebration, and a downstream prosocial outcome. By doing so, this work highlights the broader benefits of celebrations beyond the focal individual and the immediate experience. Finally, specific policy implications and suggestions for enhancing consumer well-being are provided.

  PublisherDOI

• Social Relationships and Consumer Behavior

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2022-01-01 · 1 citations

  articleOpen access
  PublisherDOI

• Social relationships and consumer behavior.

  American Psychological Association eBooks · 2021 · 8 citations

  • Sociology
  • Psychology
  • Sociology
  PublisherDOI

• Boundaries of Constructive Choice: On the Accessibility of Maximize Accuracy and Minimize Effort Goals

  Journal of Consumer Psychology · 2020 · 10 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding
  • Computer Science
  • Computer Science
  • Artificial Intelligence

  The impact of decision difficulty on search behavior depends on the relative accessibility of maximize accuracy and minimize effort goals in memory. The default assumption, derived from constructive choice theory, is that maximize accuracy and minimize effort goals are both accessible. Thus, the two goals compete to influence a decision process. When this is the case, an increase in decision difficulty discourages search and the opportunity to make an accurate decision suffers. The alternative assumption, derived from goal systems theory, is that maximize accuracy and minimize effort goals can be differentially accessible. When one of these goals is more accessible, decision difficulty signals poor goal progress and reduces goal pursuit. That is, when a maximize accuracy (minimize effort) goal is more accessible, decision difficulty reduces (increases) search. Six studies show that goal systems theory holds when a maximize accuracy or minimize effort goal is more accessible, that is, is deliberately pursued. The results have implications for how decision difficulty influences information search, satisficing, and choice quality.

  PublisherDOI

• How the Pain of Payment Can Magnify and Mitigate Choice Overload Effects

  ACR North American Advances · 2019-01-01 · 3 citations

  article
  Publisher

• Responding to reviewers: lessons from 17 years of editor experience at Duke University

  Edward Elgar Publishing eBooks · 2019-11-08

  book-chapter

  You are reading this chapter because you have decided to try your hand at sharing your research with a journal or you have already done so and are now in the enviable position where you need to respond to reviewer advice. Good for you! We are fortunate to work in the Marketing Area of the Fuqua School of Business, Duke University, which has been home to more editors of the field’s four major journals over the past fifty years (1969-2019) than any other university. We thought it would be interesting to gather our perspectives as current or former editors on this topic. In the pages that follow, you will get advice from Chris Moorman (Journal of Marketing, 2018-2022), Jim Bettman (Journal of Consumer Research, 1982-1988), Joel Huber (Journal of Marketing Research, 2006-2009), Mary Frances Luce (Journal of Consumer Research, 2011-2014), and Rick Staelin (Marketing Science, 1995-1997). There is some convergence in our thinking, but there are also times when we disagree, which we did not edit away. We think there are a number of ways to respond effectively to reviewers, and we hope you find these tips helpful in your quest to publish your research.

  PublisherDOI

• Increasing the Pain of Payment Increases Affiliation and Rapport in Collaborative But Not Competitive Relationships

  ACR North American Advances · 2019-01-01

  article
  Publisher

• Delicate Snowflakes and Broken Bonds: A Conceptualization of Consumption-Based Offense

  Journal of Consumer Research · 2018-06-02 · 34 citations

  article

  When do consumers experience offense due to another individual’s choice, use, display, gifting, sharing, or disposal of a product? Why do they experience offense, and does it matter if they do? In this article, we first draw from past work in multiple disciplines to offer a unique conceptualization of consumption-based offense. We then develop a framework of types of violations that may generate consumption-based offense and propose a set of affective, consumption, and cognitive outcomes we anticipate may follow. We close by offering an agenda for future research that may establish the antecedents and consequences of different types of consumption-based offense, glean new insights from past findings through integration of this novel construct, and offer practical insights into the effects and management of consumption-based offense both in consumers’ lives and in the marketplace.

  PublisherDOI

• The Primacy of “What” over “How Much”: How Type and Quantity Shape Healthiness Perceptions of Food Portions

  Management Science · 2018-12-07 · 1 citations

  article

  Healthy eating goals influence many consumer choices, such that evaluating the healthiness of food portions is important. Given that both the type and quantity of food jointly contribute to weight and overall health, evaluations of a food portion’s healthiness ought to consider both type and quantity. However, existing literature tends to examine food type and food quantity separately. Across seven studies, we show that consumers treat type as a primary dimension and quantity as a secondary dimension, such that a change in type (versus quantity) has a greater impact on perceived healthiness or health goal impact, even when holding objective impact constant in terms of calories. We also examine whether one reason this effect occurs is because most consumers consider type (a categorical attribute) before quantity (a continuous attribute). We conclude by discussing extensions of these ideas to other perceptual assessments involving both type and quantity (e.g., price perceptions). The online appendix and data files are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2018.3098 . This paper was accepted by Yuval Rottenstreich, decision analysis.

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• John W. Payne

  60 shared

• Mary Frances Luce

  Duke University

  43 shared

• Eric J. Johnson

  Columbia University

  28 shared

• Rosellina Ferraro

  18 shared

• Jennifer Edson Escalas

  17 shared

• Tanya L. Chartrand

  Duke University

  15 shared

• Gavan J. Fitzsimons

  Duke University

  14 shared

• Mita Sujan

  14 shared

Awards & honors

• Duke University Dean’s Award for Excellence in Mentoring (20…
• NCNB Faculty Award for the Fuqua School
• Duke University Scholar/Teacher of the Year
• Fellow of the American Psychological Association
• Fellow of the American Psychological Society