People usually like experiences less as they repeat them: they satiate. This research finds that people satiate less if they categorize the consumption episodes at lower levels. For instance, as people ate more jelly beans, their enjoyment declined less quickly when the candy was categorized specifically (e.g., cherry, orange) rather than generally (e.g., jelly bean). Three studies demonstrate this "specificity effect" for people's ratings of enjoyment both during and immediately after consumption. Process evidence shows that subcategorization focuses people's attention on differentiating aspects, making the episodes seem less repetitive and consequently less satiating. G ood things satiate (Coombs and Avrunin 1977). These three words describe a common barrier to happiness, namely, that pleasure often declines with greater consumption. Satiation causes our favorites to lose their special status, makes it hard to follow a diet, and pushes us to escalate our spending on increasingly expensive products. Life has even been compared to an unending "hedonic treadmill" where we must keep finding better experiences just to maintain our current happiness level (Brickman and Campbell 1971). Although the hedonic treadmill was discussed as a problem over 35 years ago, we still know little about how people can reduce satiation. This research demonstrates a way to counter satiation-breaking the hedonic treadmill into many treadmills by subcategorizing the episodes. This could help people enjoy themselves more and find greater happiness with what they already have.Consumers typically react to satiation by switching among alternatives (Herrnstein and Prelec 1991;McAlister 1982). Variety can reduce satiation by introducing substantive changes like the flavor of a yogurt (Rolls, Van Duijvenvoorde, and Rolls 1984) as well as nonsubstantive changes like the cosmetic features of an ad (Schumann, Petty, and Clemons 1990). However, increasing variety does not solve the problem of satiation. Past consumption still leaves people unable to enjoy their favorites as much as before. Further, *Joseph P. Redden is a visiting professor, University of Minnesota, 321 Nineteenth Avenue South, Suite 3-149, Minneapolis, MN 55455-9940 (redde007@umn.edu). The article is based on the author's doctoral dissertation completed while he was at the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania. He thanks his dissertation committee, and especially his adviser Steve Hoch, for their valuable feedback. John Deighton served as editor and Susan Broniarczyk served as associate editor for this article.Electronically published August 16, 2007 people may not even have any good alternatives or control over what they consume (e.g., a concert playlist, a toddler's diet). Given these limitations of variety, this research focuses on how people can enjoy a given set of episodes more.People satiate primarily on individual aspects of an experience (McAlister 1982;Rolls et al. 1981). For example, eating a food lowers the liking only for similar foods rather than all foods (R...

Self-control is typically viewed as a battle between willpower and desire. The authors focus on the desire side of the equation and extol the positive effect of faster satiation that makes unhealthy behaviors less tempting. They demonstrate that consumers higher in trait self-control demonstrate such "healthy" satiation as they satiate faster on unhealthy foods than on healthy foods. In contrast, those with lower self-control fail to consistently show this differential pattern in their satiation rates. This difference for high self-control people can result from faster satiation for unhealthy foods, slower satiation for healthy foods, or both in combination. Moderating and mediating evidence establish that changes in attention to the amount consumed helped account for these effects on the rate of satiation. The resulting differences in satiation influence the ultimate intake of unhealthy foods, underscoring the importance of the contribution made by differential satiation rates to overconsumption and obesity.

Order and disorder are prevalent in both nature and culture, which suggests that each environ confers advantages for different outcomes. Three experiments tested the novel hypotheses that orderly environments lead people toward tradition and convention, whereas disorderly environments encourage breaking with tradition and convention-and that both settings can alter preferences, choice, and behavior. Experiment 1 showed that relative to participants in a disorderly room, participants in an orderly room chose healthier snacks and donated more money. Experiment 2 showed that participants in a disorderly room were more creative than participants in an orderly room. Experiment 3 showed a predicted crossover effect: Participants in an orderly room preferred an option labeled as classic, but those in a disorderly room preferred an option labeled as new. Whereas prior research on physical settings has shown that orderly settings encourage better behavior than disorderly ones, the current research tells a nuanced story of how different environments suit different outcomes.

We demonstrate in two studies that people get more satiated on a food after repeatedly rating or choosing among similar foods shown in pictures. Repeated evaluations of food apparently have an effect similar to actual consumption—decreased enjoyment of foods that share a similar taste characteristic (i.e., sensory‐specific satiety). We provide mediation evidence to show that satiation manifests because considering a food engenders spontaneous simulations of the taste of that food item, which by itself is enough to produce satiation. These findings establish sensory simulations as an important mechanism underlying satiation, and provide behavioral evidence that simple evaluations can produce sensory‐specific satiety.

Consumers frequently consume items to the point where they no longer enjoy them. In a pilot study and two experiments spanning three distinct classes of stimuli, we find that people can recover from this satiation by simply recalling the variety of alternative items they have consumed in the past. And yet, people seem to exhibit "variety amnesia" in that they do not spontaneously recall this past variety despite the fact that it would result in a desirable decrease in satiation. Thus, rather than satiation being a fixed physiological process, it appears that it is at least partially constructed in the moment. We discuss some of the theoretical implications of these findings and provide some prescriptive measures for both marketers and consumers.C onsumers frequently consume products and experiences to the point where they no longer enjoy them, a process commonly referred to as "satiation" (Coombs and Avrunin 1977). This happens for a variety of stimuli ranging from the primarily physiological, such as food (Rolls, van Duijvenvoorde, and Rolls 1984) and sex (O'Donohue and Geer 1985), to the primarily nonphysiological, such as music (Ratner, Kahn, and Kahneman 1999), television programs (Nelson, Meyvis, and Galak 2009), art (Berlyne 1971), homes (Hsee et al., forthcoming), and cars (Frank 1999). In fact, satiation is often cited as a primary barrier to enduring happiness since, regardless of how satisfying a stimulus might be initially, that satisfaction tends to fade with repetition (Brickman and Campbell 1971).One way to reduce unwanted satiation is to change the consumption experience. Prior work has shown that people satiate less when they consume more slowly (Galak, Kruger, and Loewenstein 2009) John Deighton served as editor and Mary Frances Luce served as associate editor for this article.Electronically published May 8, 2009 or can subcategorize the consumption episodes (Raghunathan and Irwin 2001;Redden 2008). These approaches all act as preventive measures that slow satiation. In the present work, we instead explore remedies that can be used after satiation has occurred. If people can recover quickly and easily from a satiated state, then satiation poses a smaller problem for consumer enjoyment and happiness. In other words, people can fight satiation by either limiting it in the first place or reversing it after the fact. We focus on the latter.Prior work has identified some antecedents of recovery from satiation, including the passage of time Nelson and Meyvis 2008), and temporary exposure to a novel stimulus (Epstein et al. 1993;Hetherington et al. 2006). We build on this work by demonstrating that merely recalling the consumption of a variety of stimuli can have the same effect. Thus, we demonstrate how consumers can reduce their satiation using a simple and low-effort technique.There has been little research to date on the extent to which people spontaneously recover from satiation. Generally speaking, the literature on satiation says very little about what drives recovery or to what extent it ha...