Browsing by Subject "Authenticity"

Consumers value and seek authenticity in the marketplace, including in their products, themselves, and others. Due to its appeal to consumers, the study of authenticity in the marketplace has recently accelerated in consumer research. Adding to this research, in this work I explore antecedents and consequences of perceived authenticity related to both consumers and market offerings.

Essay 1 (“Goldilocks Signaling: How the Number of Signaling Items in an Ensemble Affects Perceptions of Consumer Authenticity”) explores how multi-product signals—consumption ensembles—are perceived by observers. Specifically, this research explores how the number of identity-signaling items (e.g., Nike items) a consumer includes in their ensemble affects observer perceptions of the consumer’s identity-specific authenticity (e.g., authenticity as an athlete). If consumers wish to be seen as authentic, essay 1 demonstrates that they have to balance self-presentation with the perception that they are trying too hard to signal. Accordingly, I find that consumers with ensembles featuring a moderate or “just right” number of signaling items are generally (with some boundaries) perceived as most authentic in relation to the identity they are signaling—a “Goldilocks signaling” effect. I demonstrate that consumers make these inferences both spontaneously, without direct prompting regarding authenticity from experimenters, and reflecting the choice patterns of more versus less authentic consumers. Furthermore, such perceptions are important to consumers’ social relationships; I demonstrate that perceived authenticity can affect how much observers like the identity-signaling consumer and how confident they are in the consumer’s identity-relevant skill. This research is one of very few experimental papers in consumer behavior to consider ensemble signaling and provides new insights into the psychological processes underlying judgments of consumers’ authenticity.

Essay 2 (“True to the Original or to the Creator? How Consumers Navigate the Tension Between Iconic and Expressive Authenticity in Evaluations of Creative Adaptations”) explores the role of authenticity in consumers’ evaluations of creative adaptations by leveraging the context of cover songs. I demonstrate that consumers’ evaluations of cover songs are driven by the relative value they place on the cover’s iconic—truth to the original—and expressive—truth to the cover artist—authenticity. Greater difference from the original causes consumers to perceive the cover song as more expressively authentic but less iconically authentic. Consumers often value both these types of authenticity, hence causing them to prefer cover songs that are moderately versus more or less different from their original. Consumers who are highly attached to the original, however, place increased value on iconic authenticity and hence prefer cover songs that are less different from their beloved original. In addition to showing support for this theory, I cast doubt on other, more general theories that could drive this effect. My findings provide a first detailed view of how multiple different types of authenticity affect consumer evaluations.

Together, these essays advance understanding of antecedents and consequences of multiple types of authenticity for both consumers (essay 1) and consumption objects (essay 2) in the marketplace.

Recent accounts of authenticity have defined the concept in terms of self-creation, self-discovery, or some combination of the two. While these accounts get something right about the concept, I argue that they fail to capture all the elements of authenticity that an adequate account ought to capture. In this dissertation, I develop and defend a novel account of authenticity that preserves some features of previous accounts while also introducing new ones. My account is two-pronged (recognizing what I term the ‘target’ and ‘response’ dimensions of authenticity), and through it I come to the conclusion that authenticity is best characterized as the practice of living in accordance with one’s values. After outlining and defending this account, I consider how it might impact or inform current debates regarding how the use of psychoactive drugs for so-called ‘enhancement’ purposes affect users’ authentic selves.

Although many perspectives suggest that authenticity is important for well-being, people do not always have direct access to the psychological processes that produce their behaviors and, thus, are not able to judge whether they are behaving consistently with their personality, attitudes, values, motives, and goals. Even so, people experience subjective feelings of authenticity and inauthenticity, raising the question of factors that influence people’s judgments of whether they are being authentic. The present studies used descriptive, correlational, experimental, and experience sampling designs to examine possible influences on self-judgments of authenticity, including the congruence between people’s behavior and inner dispositions, the positivity of the behavior, their personal beliefs about authenticity, features of the interaction, and trait authenticity. Studies 1A and 1B examined the role of people’s beliefs about authenticity in self-judgments of authenticity. Studies 2A and 2B investigated the criteria that people use to judge their behavior as authentic versus inauthentic and challenged those criteria to see whether self-perceived authenticity was affected. And, Study 3 used an experience sampling design to study people’s experiences of state authenticity in daily life. Together the studies offer insights into the determinants of self-perceived authenticity and show that many factors that influence people’s feelings of authenticity are peripheral, if not irrelevant, to actual authenticity.

Theories of self-regulation address the continuous process in which individuals compare their behavior to salient goals or standards. Two well-known theories of self-regulation, self-discrepancy theory (SDT) and regulatory focus theory (RFT), each make distinctions regarding the types of standards and goals in reference to which individuals self-regulate. Authenticity--the idea of being one's true self--has the potential to influence the kinds of goals or standards that individuals come to possess and may have implications for understanding the outcomes of self-regulatory processes. This research links the construct of authenticity with SDT and RFT, emphasizing how individual differences in authenticity could influence the motivational and affective consequences of self-regulation predicted within each theory. Individual differences in authenticity were expected to influence the nature of the goals and standards that individuals hold, as well as the acute and chronic affective consequences of discrepancies between the actual self and the ideal and ought self-guides respectively. Specifically, individual differences in authenticity were expected to predict magnitude of actual:ideal and actual:ought self-discrepancy as well as the intensity of distress that individuals report (acutely as well as chronically) in association with self-discrepancies. More importantly, self-discrepancies were expected to be less prevalent among individuals high in authenticity, but more distressing among high-authenticity individuals than among individuals with lower levels of authenticity. The results of this research suggest that individual differences in authentic behavior do have a direct influence on both acute and chronic affect. Authenticity was found to interact with self-discrepancies in predicting chronic affect. Authenticity has a unique role in the process of self-regulation, distinct from the contributions of SDT and RFT.

"Existential Realism: Modernism and the Ethics of Agency in the Franco-American Existentialist Tradition, 1937-1955” unearths the pivotal role American fiction played in the development and dissemination of the French existentialist ethics of agency. French intellectuals regarded American fiction as a reinvention of novelistic realism based on its engrossing quality. Through readings of novels by John Steinbeck, Richard Wright, and Patricia Highsmith, I show how such immersive narratives invite readers to inhabit characters’ agency. These novels illuminate a dimension of character agency that has gone overlooked in the prevailing modernist accounts of twentieth-century literature in that they allow the reader experience by proxy moral clarity and blindness. By tracing agency through the motif of gratuitous murder, I show that this fiction critiques a notion of authenticity that prizes overweening ability of one’s own ability to act. Ultimately “Existential Realism” shows both how existentialist thought enriches our appreciation of a strain of American fiction, and also how action-driven fiction dramatizes the triumphs and failures of agency.

This dissertation traces the range of popular forms and practices associated with the harpsichord in the twentieth century in the United States, focusing on the 1950s, 60s and 70s. It draws on archives of period correspondence, sound recordings, and news clippings, as well as on my interviews with harpsichord builders and performers and on fieldwork I conducted at a prominent American harpsichord company during 2008. I argue that the harpsichord enabled practices and discourses through which the white middle class could critique the post-World War II United States, and that the material aspects of the harpsichord--its sound, its wooden materials and its construction methods--provided a gauge by which to measure how far the postwar everyday had veered from what was imagined to be an "authentic" human existence.

I focus the dissertation around the influence of a particular narrative associated with the harpsichord: that of the aristocratic, delicate instrument decimated by the Industrial Revolution. I first chart the ways that this narrative circulated in academic histories and popular media during the twentieth century, and how it was linked to perceptions of the harpsichord's physical "shortcomings." Focusing on its career in 1940s-60s popular music recordings, I then show how the stereotype of its "tragically disadvantaged" sound shaped acoustic and discursive constructions of that sound. I continue by demonstrating the classed critiques surrounding the instrument's commodification as a "do-it-yourself" kit--an affordable product that seemed to contradict the instrument's history as an elite, custom-made object. Lastly, I show how the harpsichord's story articulated with the biographies and sentiments of specific people, particularly those affiliated with the shop of Massachusetts harpsichord builder Frank Hubbard in late 1960s and early 1970s. Ultimately, I argue that the Movement's ideal of "historical authenticity," along with the post-World War II mass appeal of period instruments and period performance practice, emerged out of time and place-specific meanings, and through multiple social and commodity networks.

Why are there no female art forgers? This paradoxical mystery can be attributed not only to prevailing patriarchal conceptions of art production and artists, but also to the very conceptual foundation of art forgery itself. In considering the conceptual framework that has developed in order to give way to our contemporary notion of art forgery and analyzing case studies where such conceptions are present, we can begin to understand the ways in which notions of authorship and authenticity affect artwork. These notions become apparent when addressing artwork and art products associated with technical and digital reproduction, as the conceptual framework begins to breakdown when art is facilitated by these means. As this work addresses topics concerning the digital, a website will be used in order to disseminate the scholarly work and engage the wider public in the topic of art forgery.