The team investigates the psychological mechanisms that shape how people form judgments, attitudes, and choices. This work examines how consumers make decisions in everyday contexts and how individual differences influence those decisions. A key focus is the study of unconscious and automatic processes, including implicit cognition and dual-processes, to understand when decisions arise from automatic versus deliberative processing. The team also analyzes how cues such as visual imagery affect evaluations and downstream choices. Related research considers how lay beliefs and heuristic information processing guide decisions, contributing to responsible consumption. 

The team investigates food-related beliefs, judgments, and behaviors to understand how consumers evaluate and choose foods in everyday contexts. This work examines food decision making and sustainable consumption, focusing on how lay beliefs and heuristic processing shape perceptions and guide choice. It also explores consumer responses to public policy initiatives promoting healthy and/or sustainable eating, such as front-of-pack labels, health messages, and online apps. The team further distinguishes affective and cognitive components of implicit attitudes and tests how they predict food choices depending on cognitive resources and individual differences. 

The team studies sustainability-focused consumer behavior to understand how everyday decisions contribute to sustainable or low-carbon consumption and how these choices can be encouraged through marketing practices. This research examines the drivers of sustainable choices, including how people’s relationship with nature influences their behaviors in the marketplace. A central goal is to generate insights that help organizations and policymakers design more effective interventions and better policies that move consumers toward low-carbon consumption and reduced waste. The team studies in particular the acceptability of energy-efficient technologies and policies and explores the role of behavioral and psychological biases in the acceptability of low energy solutions. The idea is to provide insight onto how business practices and public policies can influence sustainable decision making. 

The team conducts research on consumer well-being with an emphasis on transformative consumer research aimed at generating practical benefits for individuals and society. This work examines how people make everyday decisions that affect well-being-related outcomes, including sustainability, health, and diversity, and how these choices are influenced by consumers’ sensory perceptions and their relationship with nature. The team also studies interpersonal and social influence processes, such as caregiving, to understand how social contexts shape consumer choices and welfare.  

The team investigates how digital and technology-enabled environments shape consumer behavior and marketplace outcomes. This research examines in-store technologies such as robots and smart systems, as well as online consumer behavior and contemporary digital marketing issues involving influencers, virtual influencers, live-streaming, and artificial intelligence. The team also studies how emerging technologies—including AI, digital platforms, and immersive experiences—transform consumer–organization interactions and reshape brand–consumer relationships, as well as prosocial behaviors. Related work explores technology-driven commerce contexts, such as live-streaming and e-commerce, and analyzes how these developments influence consumer judgments and choices. This work generates insights to help organizations and charities design effective technologies and responsible digital strategies, considering both online and offline consequences of new technologies on interactions between stakeholders. 

The team’s research on consumer persuasion examines how communications shape consumer judgments and behavior, with a particular focus on reducing the impact of misinformation. This work studies consumer persuasion and corrective communications, investigating how to design warnings and messages—such as those addressing misleading advertising or product recalls—that are more behaviorally effective. 

The team’s research on services examines how consumers respond to service encounters and how service environments affect perceptions and behavior. This work investigates customer reactions in routine interactions as well as in service failure contexts, with a focus on identifying psychological levers that influence satisfaction, coping, and subsequent decisions. In particular, the team studies how empowerment and related mechanisms can improve consumers’ experiences and outcomes, and how the design of service environments can support more effective service delivery. This research aims to generate actionable insights for service organizations seeking to design more consumer-centric experiences and manage service challenges in ways that enhance consumer responses and well-being. One topic in particular are new service models such as renting of low energy technologies. 

Another stream of the team’s research focuses on individual variables related to consumption, including subcultures and gender, as well as specific and/or deviant consumption profiles (e.g., commuters, cosplayers, gamers), and it also includes a psychoanalytical approach to unconscious drivers of consumer behavior and related issues (e.g., desire, consumerism, deviant consumption, responsible consumption). Consumer psychology issues are analyzed across global markets, utilizing diverse data and interviews from Asia, Australia, Europe, and the Americas. We investigate how international business contexts shape fundamental psychological mechanisms and decision-making. Our work balances two key objectives: identifying distinct cross-cultural differences to isolate specific cultural effects and leveraging broad international datasets to establish the generalizability of consumer behavior theories. The team research also explores citizen reactions to energy policies in the European Union, for instance the acceptability of electricity imports from other European countries.