Dr Janina Steinmetz

About

Overview

Before joining Bayes Business School in 2018, I was an Assistant Professor of Social and Organizational Psychology at Utrecht University in the Netherlands. Until 2016, I was a post-doc at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, USA. I received my PhD in 2014 from the University of Cologne, Germany.

My work investigates consumer motivation and self-control in a social context (Ferreira, Scopelliti, & Steinmetz, in prep; Fishbach, Steinmetz, & Tu, 2016; Steinmetz & Mussweiler, 2017; Steinmetz & Pfattheicher, 2017; Steinmetz, Xu, Fishbach, & Zhang, 2016; Touré-Tillery, Steinmetz, & DiCosola, 2022). For example, I find that actions done in the presence of others are magnified. Consumers (falsely) believe that they ate larger portions of food when someone was watching them eat, because the social presence magnifies the action. This work suggests that consumers perceive the world in a fundamentally different way in the presence of others. I also find that consumers anticipate observers' thoughts and judgments about their actions, and strategically make consumption decisions to influence observers' beliefs.

In addition to my work on motivation, I’m interested in how consumers think about others and infer what others think about them (sometimes mistakenly). When thinking about others, I find that consumers apply what I call the first-member heuristic (Steinmetz, Touré-Tillery, & Fishbach, 2020): The first member of a group in a random sequence (e.g., the first student to have his or her test graded by a machine) is seen as more diagnostic for the rest of the group than any of the other group members. Thus, information about the first member (e.g., the first student's test results are bad) is used to larger extents to draw inferences about the rest of the group (e.g., all students' test results will be bad), which in turn affects behavior toward the group. When thinking about themselves, I have examined whether the way consumers' self-perceptions affect how they portray themselves in public. It shows that, when consumers project their self-perceptions onto others, systematic mishaps in impression management can occur (Steinmetz, 2018; Steinmetz, Sezer, & Sedikides, 2017).

In another major line of work, I study effects on mental simulation. For example, mental simulations of warmth and trust can affect consumers' response behavior in surveys towards greater affirmation of neutral items (Steinmetz & Posten, 2017, 2018). Mentally simulating physical states of hunger versus satiation (Steinmetz, Tausen, & Risen, 2018) also influence consumers' choices of food portion sizes.

Finally, I study how reviewers and readers perceive online reviews (Hansen & Steinmetz, 2019; Steinmetz & Pronin, in prep). For example, I find that readers' motivational states (e.g., being cold versus warm) influence whether they pay attention to individual reviews versus aggregated review information when evaluating cooling versus heating products. I also investigate reviewer characteristics that influence beliefs about their reviews' helpfulness, and test whether readers share reviewers' beliefs on review helpfulness.

Qualifications

• PhD, University of Cologne, Germany, Sep 2009 – Aug 2014

Employment

• Reader, City, University of London, Aug 2021 – present
• Senior Lecturer, City, University of London, Sep 2018 – Jul 2021
• Assistant Professor, Utrecht University, Apr 2016 – Sep 2018
• Post-doc, University of Chicago Booth School of Business, Sep 2014 – Mar 2016

Fellowships

• HEA Fellow

Memberships of committees

• Member, European Social Cognition Network Best Paper Award Committee (ESCON)

Expertise

Primary topics

• Consumer Behaviour

Research students

Publications

Professional activities