Mental Simulation and Product Evaluation: The Affective and Cognitive Dimensions of Process versus Outcome Simulation
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In this research, the authors examine the role of process versus outcome simulation in product evaluation and demonstrate how manipulating the type of information-processing mode (cognitive vs. affective) leads to unique effects in process and outcome simulation. The article begins with the premise that when consumers do not have well-formed preferences for a product, they tend to focus on the usage process. The authors predict and find that outcome simulation is more effective than process simulation in increasing product evaluation under a cognitive mode, whereas process simulation is more effective than outcome simulation under an affective mode. Establishing boundary conditions, the authors further show the effect of two important moderators that alter consumers' focus on/away from the product's usage process. Specifically, they show a reversal of the effect for each type of mental simulation for hedonic products, for which product benefits are the more salient aspect (vs. the usage process). Furthermore, a distant-future (vs. near-future) evaluation frame shifts people's focus away from the usage process toward product benefits and reverses the effect of each type of simulation. The authors conclude with a discussion of theoretical and managerial implications.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.013 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it