When Do Consumers Avoid Imperfections? Superficial Packaging Damage as a Contamination Cue
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
Across six experiments, the authors demonstrate that superficial imperfections in the form of packaging damage can engender negative consumer reactions that shape subsequent attitudes and behaviors in ways that are not always objectively justified. Their findings show that these reactions function in a relatively automatic fashion, even emerging under conditions in which the packaging damage does not convey information about a health and safety threat from the product. The authors extend work on contagion to show that superficial packaging damage can act as a contamination cue, automatically activating thoughts of contamination and health and safety concerns. This tendency to avoid superficial packaging damage can be eliminated by counteracting these thoughts of contamination. This can be done with positive brand associations (i.e., by branding the product as organic) or by creating a physical buffer between the packaging damage and the product itself. The authors close with a discussion of implications for marketers, consumers, and public policy makers.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.021 | 0.009 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 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