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Sucker Rumination: How Aversive Self-Directed Cognitions Affect Purchase Intentions, Tyler F. Stillman, Gregory S. Pruess

Mountain Plains Journal of Business and Technology

If there is a silver lining to having been tricked in an economic context, perhaps it is that one can be wiser for the experience. Presumably, people are able to learn from such transactions and avoid them in the future. The current study employed an experimental design in which some participants were assigned to a control condition and others were told that they had recently been duped. Results indicated that among those who felt duped, people high in sucker rumination were subsequently less likely to avoid the source of deception. That is, people with a tendency to blame themselves harshly …