Research

Algorithms that curate social media feeds typically rank posts based on predicted engagement with each post. However, consumers’ engagement also depends on adjacent posts. Eight preregistered studies (N = 4,103) show that consumers perceive sequences in which profane content (e.g., advertisements, memes) follows sacred content (e.g., posts about heroism, leaders, or babies) as more inappropriate than when it follows less sacred content. This is because profane content intrudes on the psychological space consumers need after encountering sacred content. Consistent with this account, this effect attenuates when the subsequent content is also sacred, when profane content appears before sacred content, and when a neutral post separates sacred and profane content. Perceived inappropriateness of the sequence reduces engagement (e.g., “liking” the profane content) and leads to unfavorable evaluations of the platform, algorithm, and brand. Furthermore, consumers expect others to preserve psychological space for sacred content, evaluating content creators’ behavior more negatively when they post profane content soon after sacred content. These findings extend theories of the sacred and profane, contribute to research on media context and moral judgment, and offer practical implications for platforms, algorithm design, and content creators.

While much research has examined the effects of practicing mindfulness, less is known about how mindful behaviors are perceived by others and how observing these behaviors shapes interpersonal judgments. Nine main experiments and two supplemental experiments (total N = 4,803; all preregistered) demonstrate that a person who engages mindfully (vs. non-mindfully) in a mundane experience (e.g., eating, walking, drinking coffee)—what we term mundane mindfulness—is perceived as higher in social class. We identify two inferential processes that underlie this effect. Displaying mundane mindfulness leads observers to infer that (a) the target is less cognitively burdened by financial strain, and (b) the target has a stronger aesthetic disposition shaped by socialization. In turn, both inferences result in judgments of higher social class. Consistent with this theoretical model, the class-signaling effect of mundane mindfulness is attenuated for activities that inherently require cognitive focus and aesthetic engagement (e.g., knitting), among observers who attribute cognitive burden in everyday life to non-monetary (vs. monetary) matters, and when the target’s mindful attention is directed toward the functional (vs. aesthetic) features of the experience. These findings advance the mindfulness and social class literatures by demonstrating the social implications of mindfulness and uncovering its role as a social class cue that operates through distinct inferential pathways.

Previous research has suggested that consumers judge others’ emotional expressions relative to contextual norms, such as culture, situation, or the nature of the emotional event. We posit that this context includes the person’s involvement with the emotional event. Specifically, we assert and find that, across a wide range of emotional events, how acceptable people’s emotional expression seems to others depends on how personally involved they were in the emotional event (across Western and Eastern cultures; studies 1a and 1b). That is, those who were less personally involved were entitled to display lower intensity and a narrower range of emotion than those who were more personally involved. Further, when those who were less personally involved showed emotions stronger than their entitled response, they were judged as more selfish than when they showed lower levels of emotion, for both negative (studies 2 and 4) and positive (study 3) emotions, leading observers to comply less with expressors’ prosocial requests (study 4). Finally, this judgment of selfishness was attenuated when the emotional display occurred in private, rather than in public (study 5), suggesting that people judge an excessive response as selfish because they believe the person is using it for social benefits.