Judgments of Taste and Judgments of Quality
本文是《消费者心理学杂志》新任编辑的社论，阐述了在稿件评审中鼓励质量判断而非品味判断的理念，并介绍了期刊各栏目对多样性研究方法的支持。
“…the person who is in the executive chair may not be the final arbiter of taste for the entire population.” - Frank Zappa In a little over two decades, the Journal of Consumer Psychology has rapidly risen to become a premier research outlet. Under Pechmann and Kirmani's excellent stewardship, the number of submissions has grown from 336 in 2010 to 483 in 2016—a 43% increase in 6 years. This robust growth reflects the growing worldwide interest in the field of consumer psychology. We are proud to take the helm at this peak in its development. Our goal is to encourage this growth and keep the journal strong by maintaining a system that is friendly both to authors and reviewers, and by helping papers through the review process to enhance their potential impact. The rapid growth of the field has brought with it an increasing diversity of research approaches and viewpoints. As incoming Editors of JCP, we welcome and embrace this diversity. Starting from a small, relatively homogenous community of scholars primarily trained in the social psychology paradigm, the journal now attracts interest and submissions from judgment and decision-making scholars, cognitive scientists, neuroscientists, marketing scientists, and economists, behavioral and otherwise. This diversity of viewpoints has added fuel to the always-simmering debate between “rigor” and “relevance.” The dance between the goals of internal and external validity goes back decades (e.g., Calder, Phillips, & Tybout, 1982; Lynch, 1982, 1983). In our opinion, this reflects different research goals and tastes rather than differential levels of quality. We will welcome all papers relevant to consumer psychology, irrespective of their paradigm and choice of method. This editorial describes how we plan to encourage judgments of quality to prevail over judgments of taste. A second effect of the growth of submissions outpacing growth in journal pages is that our field has placed increasing demands on authors. Authors are frequently required to cover all bases in a single paper, leading to the prototypical formula: find an effect, demonstrate moderation, demonstrate mediation, and establish external validity. This approach is not without value, but requiring every paper to be everything to everyone can limit the scope of inquiry, place unnecessary demands on authors, and create cookie-cutter papers that check all the boxes but offer limited insight. As editors, we will encourage the authors to identify the primary dimension on which they intend their research to make its impact and provide theoretical and empirical depth on that main dimension while clearly acknowledging its limitations on others. We will encourage our AE's and reviewers to adopt similar contribution standards and believe this approach will provide more value for the community as a whole, rather than require every paper to achieve everything. This criterion applies across the diversity of approaches in consumer psychology. For example, theory development papers, or those critiquing an existing theory or identifying boundary conditions, need not necessarily conduct a field experiment. Some research is intended to help us understand what can happen, rather than to make claims about generalizability (Mook, 1983). All findings, whether obtained in the laboratory or in the field, are observed under a particular set of underlying conditions that can limit their generalizability in another context, whether superficially similar (i.e., another “real-world” context) or not (McGuire, 1983). Theoretically relevant potential moderators (i.e., factors that could limit the generalizability of the effect) can be mapped onto underlying constructs and tested in a way that builds theory and establishes boundary conditions better than a single, arbitrarily chosen field study can (Petty & Cacioppo, 1996). In this spirit, if the primary purpose of the paper is to develop theory, we will not require authors to conduct and report a field study. Rather, the focus should be on comprehensive literature reviews, deep theorizing, and experiments that test this theory as rigorously as possible. In a similar vein, papers identifying a sufficiently novel and practically important phenomenon need not necessarily nail down precisely what causes it. Descriptive research, when it uncovers a sufficiently compelling phenomenon, constitutes some of the foundational findings in psychology (Rozin, 2009), and, indeed, natural science. Some research is meant to demonstrate what does happen in the world (Mook, 1983), and influential papers of this type can identify an important and unexplained phenomenon and stimulate further research without conclusively demonstrating the underlying process (e.g., the endowment effect, Thaler, 1980). For such research, demonstrations of process are of secondary importance—the focus should be on demonstrating robustness, effect sizes, and real-world consequences. Overall, irrespective of whether the primary purpose of the paper is to identify an effect or develop theory, we will encourage authors to use their limited resources, valuable time, and journal space to enhance just that contribution. Finally, although JCP papers need to be relevant to consumer psychology, not all JCP papers need to also inform managerial practice, consumer welfare, or public policy (or all three!). We recognize that papers can have a diversity of legitimate aims, and we encourage this diversity. JCP is unique among consumer behavior journals in having multiple article formats to accommodate the diversity of potential research contributions. These formats accommodate large, purely theoretical pieces, well-developed empirical collections, and cutting-edge empirical demonstrations. The Research Articles section resembles most consumer behavior journals. It is the largest section in JCP, representing nearly two-thirds of all submissions. Articles in this section are primarily empirical and follow the standard format familiar to consumer psychologists. We will aim to maintain its high levels of quality and popularity while implementing the principles outlined in this Editorial. This section will be jointly edited by Anirban Mukhopadhyay and Christian Wheeler. JCP contains two sections for pieces that attempt to bring some structure to existing research and, thereby, foster additional research: Research Reviews and Research Dialogues. The goal of Research Reviews is big picture theory development. Some of the most influential papers in consumer behavior are theory papers, and we hope to see more basic theory published at JCP. A successful Research Review does not merely summarize prior research, but, rather, integrates prior work in a manner that both shapes our understanding of the existing literature and stimulates new empirical work. Strong theory papers provide new organizing frameworks, create new lenses through which to view prior findings, and make bold, new predictions (Davis, 1971; Healy, 2017; Kruglanski, 2001). We are delighted that Angela Lee will be handling this section. Research Dialogues are designed to present differing points of view on a mature or emerging topic of interest and to foster debate on this topic. The focal piece in a Dialogue tends to be integrative and dealing mostly with the author's own work. Then, invited experts who have worked in related areas write brief commentaries from their own perspectives, and the focal author responds. This format provides a unique back-and-forth exchange between leading scholars on key current topics in the field and has featured some of the most influential JCP articles in the recent past. We are delighted that Aradhna Krishna, who has played an instrumental role in developing the Research Reports format, will continue her valued involvement with JCP, now handling this section. Finally, Research Reports is the fastest growing section of JCP, signaling its growing popularity within the field. This section sets a high bar for novelty. There are four sources of novelty: the research question, the statistical methods, the data, or the findings. The most common source of novelty is the research question. Of course, not everything new is novel; and calling an old effect by a new name does not make it novel either. There is a rich literature we can and should be drawing on. Some papers go beyond traditional analyses and present statistical methods that are novel to the field (e.g., Galoni & Noseworthy, 2015). The value here is that these methods may help answer questions that otherwise would not be answerable. Novel data frequently come from well-designed laboratory or field studies, whose purpose is less to test theories than to show that manipulations affect consumers in ways that would not have been predicted a priori (e.g., De Bruyn & Prokopec, 2013). Novelty can also be of findings. For example, even null effects can be novel if the interventions are well designed, the sample is large, and the findings go against conventional wisdom (e.g., Elbel, Kersh, Brescoll, & Dixon, 2009). JCP is the only journal in Marketing to consider papers such as Research Reports, and we believe that these have the potential to lead our field in exciting new directions. Priya Raghubir will be editing Research Reports. So, what are the implications for the JCP community? For authors, the single greatest challenge is to ask and compellingly answer why your research is important and who should care about it. Clearly delineate in your Introduction and General Discussion which constituency your results are important for, and state specific goals and implications accordingly. Papers that yield unique insights into consumer behavior need not instruct managers how to increase profits, but they should advance theory. Likewise, papers with strong managerial or societal implications need not necessarily revise our understanding of theoretical constructs, but they should be practicable, robust, and important. Strong papers will make compelling statements about theory or about practice, but rarely both. Correspondingly, authors should acknowledge limitations in areas that are of peripheral interest—strengths in focal areas will compensate for deficits in areas that are not focal. In terms of empirics, this means that while single-experiment papers are not the norm, some data sets are sufficiently strong and/or unique to stand by themselves, particularly in the Research Reports format (e.g., Cornil, Chandon, & Krishna, 2017; Walasek, Bhatia, & Brown, 2018). Compelling field experiments need not be perforce buttressed by additional experiments identifying process (e.g., Soman & Cheema, 2011). Correspondingly, for research that aims to examine process, we will encourage authors to test mediators that are sufficiently distinct from both the independent and dependent variables so as to truly speak to intervening constructs. Moreover, mediation analyses are not the only means of demonstrating process; we also welcome moderators as process tests. That said, we value interaction effects not by the statistical significance of the interaction terms per se, but rather based on the extent to which they shed light on either the underlying process or the generalizability of the causal relationship of interest. From its initiation, JCP has been “author-friendly.” We intend to keep it this way. Sometimes, the review process makes research itself feel aversive. We expect to continue to guide the review process in the direction taken by Kirmani (2015), aiming to: encourage reviewers and associate editors to be more tolerant of the imperfection that is revealed by… transparency [of data reporting]. We will do what we can to screen out questionable research practices and are aware that overly directive editorial intervention may itself stimulate such practices. At JCP, review teams will be requested to work with authors to make each paper the best that it can be, not “hijack” the review process (Lynch, 1998). Following earlier examples, we will do so by being more accepting of papers that are different from the mainstream and judging different types of research by different criteria (Alba, 2012; Lynch, Alba, Krishna, Morwitz, & Gürhan-Canli, 2012; Pham, 2013). Ultimately, as JCP editors, we will empathize with authors' goals and evaluate the quality of the evidence vis a vis those goals, rather than with members of the review team who may evaluate manuscripts based on their own tastes. We will ask, Does this article do what the authors set out to do at a level that meets JCP's high standards? This is what we mean when we say we will encourage judgments of quality to prevail over judgments of taste. To conclude, there is a difference between publishing a paper and making an impact. Our combined goal at JCP—authors, reviewers, and editors—is to publish influential papers; not merely those that have the fewest flaws. Controversial papers; integrative papers; novel effects; important findings that speak to consumer welfare and/or public policy; papers that introduce a new method; papers that deepen our understanding of process and theory; and those that benefit businesses, all can be influential. The field is large enough now to accommodate both theoretical rigor and relevance to practice—and at JCP, we aim to do both, but not necessarily in the same article. We recognize and acknowledge the great responsibility given us as Editors. We are fortunate to have a diverse and outstanding set of Associate Editors, and an excellent Editorial Review Board. Together, rather than imposing our personal tastes on a vibrant and diverse field; we will serve as arbiters of quality.