The influence of event-time (vs. clock-time) scheduling style on satiation

Yangyi (Eric) Tang, Zhongqiang (Tak) Huang, Lei Su

Journal of Consumer Psychology · 2023 · Volume 33 · Issue 1

Abstract

Consumers often need to schedule different activities. While consumers who adopt aclock-time scheduling styledecide when to transition from one activity to the next according to external temporal cues (e.g., clock), those who adopt anevent-time scheduling styletend to perform each activity until they feel internally that it is completed. This research showed that consumers' scheduling style (clock-time vs. event-time) could influence their satiation with repeated consumption. Four studies involving actual consumption across various domains (e.g., music, artwork, food) demonstrated that an event-time scheduling style leads to more rapid satiation with repeated consumption than a clock-time scheduling style because event-timers (vs. clock-timers) have higher private self-focus. The results further revealed that the satiation effect of scheduling style is mitigated when consumers are distracted from their private self or informed of additional sensitization cues in the consumption stimuli.

Keywords

enjoyment, private self-focus, satiation, scheduling style

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