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Consumers adapt to many new experiences. New positive experiences tend to be less pleasurable over time, whereas new negative experiences tend to become less painful over time. When an experience is disrupted, the authors hypothesize that this adaptation will also be disrupted and, as a consequence, will intensify the overall experience. If this is true, disruptions should improve some pleasant experiences and worsen some negative experiences. This hypothesis belies a strong consumer intuition to maintain continuity in positive experiences and seek disruptions in negative experiences. Under some circumstances, therefore, people may actively pursue inferior experiences.

Six studies test the hypothesis that interrupting a consumption experience can make pleasant experiences more enjoyable and unpleasant experiences more irritating. People found a noise more aversive (Study 1) and a massage more pleasurable (Study 2) when it was briefly disrupted, despite a strong belief that the opposite would be true. Furthermore, this effect was not due to contrast effects between the experience and the disruption, because a noise was worse regardless of whether it was disrupted by a pleasant sound or an annoying sound (Study 3) and a likeable song was better regardless of whether it was disrupted by a noise or by another likeable song (Study 4).

In the final two studies, the authors collected online measures of the ongoing experience to identify the adaptation process more clearly. As predicted by adaptation, when people listened to a sustained irritating noise, they reported less irritation over time. However, when the noise was disrupted by a few seconds of silence, people did not adapt to the experience (Study 5). A parallel finding was observed in the online ratings of people listening to a likeable song (Study 6).

Disrupted experiences can be experienced more intensely than continuous ones. This simple observation can have profound consequences for sales and service providers. For example, consider a masseuse who wants to ensure the best possible experience for his or her clients. The findings suggest that despite the masseuse’s clients’ wishes, he or she should disrupt the massage, if only briefly, to ensure that the whole experience is judged more positively.

Biography
Leif D. Nelson is Assistant Professor of Marketing in the Rady School of Management at the University of California, San Diego. He received his BA from Stanford University and his PhD from Princeton University. He investigates when desired consumption experiences diverge from ideal consumption experiences.

Tom Meyvis is Associate Professor of Marketing in the Stern School of Business at New York University. He received his PhD in Marketing from the University of Florida and his Licentiaat in Experimental Psychology from the Catholic University of Leuven, Belgium. His research examines consumer information processing and decision making in the context of branding (brand extensions, the management of brand associations), pricing (the processing of store price comparisons, flat rate pricing, purchase timing decisions), and the management of hedonic consumption experiences (e.g., the effect of commercial interruptions on the enjoyment of television shows). 

J Marketing Research, Volume 45, Number 6, December 2008
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