When Seeking the Best Brings Out the Worst in Consumers: Understanding the Relationship between a Maximizing Mindset and Immoral Behavior
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Consumers often adopt a goal to choose “the best” option: be it the best value for their money, the product with the highest quality, or the product that offers the best match to their idiosyncratic preferences. Prior work has characterized this orientation as a “maximizing mindset,” and has demonstrated that the adoption of a maximizing mindset can lead to both positive and negative consequences for the self. However, to date, little is known about if a maximizing mindset might have consequences beyond the self (i.e., for others and/or society). The current article addresses this gap by demonstrating that consumers who adopt a maximizing mindset (vs. a neutral mindset) are subsequently more likely to engage in immoral behaviors. Further, we demonstrate that this effect occurs because a maximizing mindset activates cognitions related to scarcity. In doing so, the current research offers a more nuanced understanding of the psychological and behavioral consequences of a maximizing mindset and identifies a maximizing mindset as an antecedent to cognitions related to scarcity and immoral behaviors.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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 itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".