Overview

At the core of my research is one central question: How do people maintain a positive self-image? This question has led me to explore how people call themselves “good” across various contexts. One stream of work examines the emotions consumers believe they must experience to view themselves as morally appropriate. In other streams, my work investigates how consumers maintain an image of themselves as virtuous when faced with the temptation of selfishness (e.g., in prosocial requests) or indulgence (e.g., in self-control dilemmas). Finally, I explore when consumers feel unentitled to claim to certain identities (e.g., cyclist, yogi, advocate, etc.). These primary interests have naturally branched into secondary interests including dyadic consumption and health and nutrition. You can see a visual representation of this evolution here.

See my extended research statement for my full framework, and descriptions of research projects (last updated 2023).

In 2025, I received the Society for Consumer Psychology Early Career Award, which is awarded to up to two scholars annually within eight years of receiving their Ph.D. and recognizes emerging scholars whose research promises to shape the field of consumer psychology.

Selected Publications

Lin, Stephanie C. (2025), “Pathways for Avoiding Self-Sanction: How Consumers Give Themselves a PASS in Virtue Violations,” Consumer Psychology Review, 8(1), 60-74.

Schaumberg, Rebecca L. and Stephanie C. Lin (2024), “Partitioned Prosociality: Why Giving a Large Donation Bit-by-Bit Makes People Seem More Committed to Social Causes,” Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 10.1037/xge0001705.

Lin, Stephanie C., Taly Reich, and Tamar A. Kreps (2023), “Feeling Good or Feeling Right: Sustaining Negative Emotion After Exposure to Human Suffering,” Journal of Marketing Research, 60(3), 543-563.

Lin, Stephanie C. and Dale T. Miller (2021), “A Dynamic Perspective on Moral Choice: Revisiting Moral Hypocrisy,” Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 164, 203-217,

Huang, Szu-chi, Stephanie C. Lin, and Ying Zhang (2019), “When Individual Goal Pursuit Turns Competitive: How We Sabotage and Coast,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 117(3), 605–620.

Lin, Stephanie C. and Taly Reich (2018), “To Give or Not to Give? Choosing Chance Under Moral Conflict,” Journal of Consumer Psychology (Special Issue: Marketplace Morality), 28(2), 211-233.

Liu, Peggy J.* and Stephanie C. Lin* (2018), “Projecting Lower Competence to Maintain Moral Warmth in the Avoidance of Prosocial Requests,” Journal of Consumer Psychology, 28(1), 23-29. (*equal contribution)

Lin, Stephanie C., Julian J. Zlatev, and Dale T. Miller (2017), “Moral Traps: When Self-Serving Attributions Backfire in Prosocial Behavior,” Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 70, 198-203.

Lin, Stephanie C., Rebecca L. Schaumberg, and Taly Reich (2016), “Sidestepping the Rock and the Hardplace: The Private Avoidance of Prosocial Requests,” Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 64, 35-40.

Under Review

Xue, Sherrie Ying Ying†, Stephanie C. Lin, and Christilene du Plessis, “Men Avoid Experience Sharing,” under second round review at Psychological Science. (†Ph.D. student advisee)

Xue, Sherrie Ying Ying†, Stephanie C. Lin, Pierre Chandon, and Andde Indaburu, “Preservation Options Increase Purchase,” invited revision at Journal of Marketing. (†Ph.D. student advisee)

Lin, Stephanie C., Kaitlin Woolley, and Peggy J. Liu, “Virtuously Virtuous,” under review.

Bao, Xueqi (Sookie)†, Stephanie C. Lin, and Amitava Chattopadhyay, “A Good Day for You, but a Bad Day for Promotion? The Unexpected Effects of Promoting after Posting on High Significance Life Events.” (†Ph.D. student advisee)

Chapters

Huang, Szu-chi and Stephanie C. Lin, “Goal Pursuit in Competition: A Temporally Dynamic Model,” (2022) in Oxford Handbook on the Psychology of Competition, eds. Stephen M. Garcia and Avishalom Tor, Oxford University Press.

Working Papers

Lin, Stephanie C., Julian J. Zlatev, and Dale T. Miller, “It Wouldn’t Have Mattered Anyway: When Overdetermined Outcomes Justify Our Sins.”

Lin, Stephanie C., S. Christian Wheeler, and Sherrie Ying Ying Xue (working paper), “Have Your Cake and Make Her Eat It Too: Influencing One’s Social Influence to Justify Indulgence.”

Lin, Stephanie C., Rebecca L. Schaumberg, and Nicole Thio, “Identity Entitlement and Poser Avoidance.”

Selected Work In Progress

Lin, Stephanie C., Hannah H. Chang, and Adelle X. Yang, “Redundancy Aversion.”

Lin, Stephanie C., Xueqi (Sookie) Bao, and Tamar A. Kreps, “Appropriateness of Emotions Depends on Perceived Entitlement.”

Lin, Stephanie C., Taly Reich, and Tamar A. Kreps, “Guilt as a Meta-Emotion.”

Other Publications

Open Science Collaboration (2015), “Estimating the Reproducibility of Psychological Science,” Science, 349(6251), aac4716.

Mayer, John D., Stephanie C. Lin, and Maria Korogodsky (2011), “Exploring the Universality of Personality Judgments: Evidence from the Great Transformation (1000 BCE–200 BCE),” Review of General Psychology, 15(1), 65-76.