Can Psychological Priming Affect Self-Rated Product Desirability? Preregistered Experimental Evidence from 1274 Individuals

Sammanfattning: Conventional economic theory often assumes that preferences are exogenously fixed and remain constant over time. A growing literature is trying to relax this assumption by endogenizing preferences and shedding light on how they are determined and potentially affected by external factors such as culture, environment, or identity. In this paper, I contribute to this strand of literature by using insights from psychology to examine whether psychological priming affects preferences. In particular, I test whether reading an unethical text affects preferences, insofar as they manifest through a self-rated desirability rating, for hygiene products. To do this, I conducted two large-scale, identical, preregistered (https://osf.io/jphmb/) experiments on separate samples with N=458 and N=816, respectively. Contrary to previous findings, I find no reliable evidence that reading an unethical text affects self-rated desirability for hygiene products, suggesting that this priming likely has no effect on preferences and that past findings may be false positives.