My dissertation looks at enhancing experiences through subjective mastery.
Subjective mastery is the feeling of some expertise with a consumer domain and is most conceptually similar to "domain specific self-efficacy."
Generally it makes people enjoy items more.
Subjective mastery can be experienced with and without objective "real" mastery. Thus it is a big part of "real" mastery's influence on enjoyment and something much more.
It is both a chronic feeling and something that can change based on momentary feedback quite feasibly by marketers.
We find this subjective mastery effect is stronger for high versus low quality items.
And this occurs even if we just tell consumers the item is high quality.
(and further even if the item is just a terrible short story I wrote as a 20-year-old)
We find these effects occurs in part through identity and also through perceived understanding.
Importantly we draw a distinction between two types of enjoyment.
Item-Enjoyment:
enjoyment experienced from the consumption item itself
(e.g. liking of the taste)
Process-Enjoyment:
enjoyment experienced from the consumption process
(e.g. critiquing the taste)
Accordingly, feeling subjective mastery before engaging in a consumption experience can lead to increased process-enjoyment separate from item-enjoyment, such as when engaging in the process of critiquing low quality items.
In past work, feelings about the process and the item have been intertwined (e.g. in the IKEA effect, intrinsic motivation) or not explicitly examined together.
In our investigation, we examine how feelings about the item and the process can at times operate separately. Accordingly our work expands on and integrates these past findings into our overall framework.
Finally, a major goal of our work is not to present a completely new construct but to represent a somewhat familiar concept through a new formal framework and with a focus on enjoyment that allows for testing new and interesting questions around types of enjoyment, types of items, and types of identity .
The hope is this new framework will open the door to future research on this powerful and pervasive construct and spark new questions that are inspired from this new framework -- some of which I explore in the later half of my dissertation.
