So far in this course we have dealt entirely with the evolution of characters that are controlled by simple Mendelian inheritance at a single locus. There are notes on the course website about gametic disequilibrium and how allele frequencies change at two loci simultaneously, but we didn’t discuss them. In every example we’ve considered we’ve imagined that we could understand something about evolution by examining the evolution of a single gene. That’s the domain of classical population genetics. For the next few weeks we’re going to be exploring a field that’s actually older than classical population genetics, although the approach we’ll be taking to it involves the use of population genetic machinery. If you know a little about the history of evolutionary biology, you may know that after the rediscovery of Mendel’s work in 1900 there was a heated debate between the “biometricians” (e.g., Galton and Pearson) and the “Mendelians” (e.g., de Vries, Correns, Bateson, and Morgan). Biometricians asserted that the really important variation in evolution didn’t follow Mendelian rules. Height, weight, skin color, and similar traits seemed to

Human biochemical genetics

Consumer researchers' growing interest in consumer experiences has revealed that many consumption activities produce both hedonic and utilitarian outcomes. Thus, there is an increasing need for scales to assess consumer perceptions of both hedonic and utilitarian values. This article describes the development of a scale measuring both values obtained from the pervasive consumption experience of shopping. The authors develop and validate the scale using a multistep process. The results demonstrate that distinct hedonic and utilitarian shopping value dimensions exist and are related to a number of important consumption variables. Implications for further applications of the scale are discussed.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/2489765.pdf

Work and/or Fun: Measuring Hedonic and Utilitarian Shopping Value

The measurement of meaning

On-line consumer reviews, functioning both as informants and as recommenders, are important in making purchase decisions and for product sales. Their persuasive impact depends on both their quality and their quantity. This paper uses the elaboration likelihood model to explain how level of involvement with a product moderates these relationships. The study produces three major findings: (1) the quality of on-line reviews has a positive effect on consumers' purchasing intention, (2) purchasing intention increases as the number of reviews increases, and (3) low-involvement consumers are affected by the quantity rather than the quality of reviews, but high-involvement consumers are affected by review quantity mainly when the review quality is high. These findings have implications for on-line sellers in terms of how to manage on-line consumer reviews.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/27751234.pdf

The Effect of On-Line Consumer Reviews on Consumer Purchasing Intention: The Moderating Role of Involvement

Popularity of brand posts on brand fan pages : An investigation of the effects of social media marketing

Internet forums as influential sources of consumer information

Preferences toward popular music appear to reflect tastes acquired during late adolescence or early adulthood. In an empirical investigation of this parsimonious inductive proposition, both the aggregate results ( R = 0.84) and the disaggregated findings ( R = 0.46) suggest that the development of tastes for popular music follows an inverted U-shaped pattern that reaches a peak in about the 24th year. Possible explanations include intrinsic components (e.g., a developmental period of maximum sensitivity analogous to the critical periods documented in ethological studies of imprinting) and extrinsic components (e.g., social pressures from one's peer group that reach peak intensity during a particular phase in one's life cycle).

Some Exploratory Findings on the Development of Musical Tastes

New data pertaining to tastes for popular culture support and extend the previous finding that consumers tend to form enduring preferences during a sensitive period in their lives. A psychographic ...

Age, Sex, and Attitude toward the past as Predictors of Consumers’ Aesthetic Tastes for Cultural Products:

This paper provides a brief preview of some work in progress on the phenomenon of nostalgia in consumer behavior. It begins by introducing some background considerations and key definitions. It then reviews an initial finding on what appears to be a nostalgia-related preference peak in musical tastes. Three limitations in this study suggest directions for further research. The resulting work in progress involves three studies designed to address various aspects of these three limitations. NOSTALGIA IS OLD The phenomenon of nostalgia is almost as old as life itself. Metaphorically, when God banished Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden, they very soon had reason to look back with longing to how nice things had been in the good old days. Since then, a wistful desire to recapture the dear departed past has haunted humankind. Many agree with M. H. Abrams (1971) that this impulse to regain Paradise to achieve a reconciliation with Lost Innocence and a reunification with the Prelapsarian Beauty of the World is the essence of romanticism. Thus, Homer's Odysseus struggles to return home, and the hero of Joyce's Ulysses repeats a comparable journey. Poets like Milton in Paradise Lost, novelists like Proust in Remembrance of Things Past, songwriters like Lennon and-McCartney in \"Yesterday,\" and screenwriters like George Lucas in \"American Graffiti\" have constantly reiterated similar themes. And, as Bart Giamatti (1989) never tired of reminding us, our National Pastime replays the urge to come home at least 52 times per game, weather permitting. In sum, then, it seems fair to say that the sense of nostalgia has always inextricably infused our consciousness of the basic human condition. NOSTALGIA IS NEW Nevertheless, nostalgia has recently received renewed attention from popular journalists and marketing practitioners observing the contemporary scene in America. Many commentators feel that the role of nostalgia in modern society is increasing, perhaps because the multitudinous Baby-Boom Generation has now started to reach an age at which nostalgia begins to matter in a Big Way. Thus, for example, Becky Holman recently told a columnist for the Minneapolis Star Tribune that \"people are studying nostalgia today the way they studied sex in advertising three years ago\" (Meyers 1990, p. 1D). We see evidence of this nostalgia boom everywhere we look in reruns of the old Jackie Gleason programs and the formation of the Royal Association for the Longevity and Preservation of the Honeymooners (R.A.L.P.H.); in the reassessment of Richard Nixon and a new willingness to reconsider him as something more human(e) than he seemed at the time of Viet Nam and Watergate; in the emergence of Victorian and Country-Kitchen fashion trends and the introduction of such fad-oriented magazines as Victoria, Memories, and Joe Franklin's Nostalgia; in the resurgence of 1950s Rock 'n' Roll and Member Login

Echoes of the Dear Departed Past: Some Work in Progress on Nostalgia

Analysis of the rightmost digits of selling prices in a sample of retail price advertisements confirmed past findings indicating the overrepresentation of the digits 0, 5, and 9. The high cognitive accessibility of round numbers can account for the overrepresentation of 0- and 5-ending prices and suggests the existence of two effects that could account for the overrepresentation of 9-ending prices: (1) a tendency of consumers to perceive a 9-ending price as a round-number price with a small amount given back and (2) a tendency of consumers to underestimate a 9-ending price by encoding it as the first round number evoked during incomplete left-to-right processing. Analysis of the patterns of rightmost digits observed in the sample provides supportive evidence particularly for the second of these two 9-ending effects.

Robert M. Schindler

Papers

Internet forums as influential sources of consumer information

Some Exploratory Findings on the Development of Musical Tastes

Age, Sex, and Attitude toward the past as Predictors of Consumers’ Aesthetic Tastes for Cultural Products:

Echoes of the Dear Departed Past: Some Work in Progress on Nostalgia

Patterns of Rightmost Digits Used in Advertised Prices: Implications for Nine-Ending Effects