Adam H. Smiley

@asmiley.bsky.social

488 Followers 594 Following

Social psychologist and assistant professor at Belmont University. affective polarization, religion, judgment & decision making, metascience. Washington PhD 🟣🟡 ✞ https://adamhsmiley.owlstown.net/

a product or commit to a subscription, consumers routinely make judgments about how much longer things will last. Across 24 studies (N = 9718), this research introduces and tests the continuity heuristic, an intuitive forecasting strategy in which consumers use how long something has lasted as a basis for predicting how long it will continue. This temporal extrapolation shapes judgments across a diverse set of consumer domains, including brand heritage, product obsolescence, subscription retention, and trend forecasting. Even when quality is held constant, and age is not explicitly mentioned, past duration predicts future longevity expectations. We propose a question-substitution account, where consumers faced with the difficult question “How long will it last?” often rely on the easier and more accessible “How long has it lasted?” This substitution explains why the effect weakens for technology products, where clear lifespan norms provide direct answers to the target question, and for expert consumers, who can draw on domain knowledge to estimate longevity without relying on past duration. This research contributes to the psychology of temporal judgment and provides marketers with a tool for predicting preference, loyalty, and perceived durability.
Ameliorators and Aggravators of Affective Polarization, an SPSP 2026 symposium from 2-3:10 on Saturday Feb 28th in E353A
Giesel library at UCSD
A hand drawn laptop with R studio open o the screen
Two dogs, Annie and Miel, posed with fall attire and pumpkins
Annie, a Hungarian vizsla
A pointing Vizsla (bird dog)
Abstract for the paper Null regions: a unified conceptual framework for statistical inference