The goal of this article is to develop a new theory-driven scale for measuring salespeople’s interpersonal mentalizing skills—that is, a salesperson’s ability to “read the minds” of customers in the sense of recognizing customer intentionality and processing subtle interpersonal cues, as well as adjusting volitions accordingly. The authors refer to the domain-specific theory-of-mind scale as the salesperson theory-of-mind (SToM) scale.
The convergent, discriminant, concurrent, predictive, and nomological validities of measures of the scale are established through the use of four methods in four separate studies. In Study 1, the authors identify real situations and tasks that require interpersonal mentalizing by actual salespeople and develop a paper-and-pencil measure of the SToM. Study 2 replicates the findings of Study 1 and further relates the SToM scale to performance and other variables related to interpersonal mentalizing. In both Studies 1 and 2, convergent, discriminant, and criterion-related validities are investigated. Study 2 also goes further to examine nomological validity of the measures of the SToM scale through the use of structural equation models. Study 3 then collects data using the multitrait–multimethod matrix, and it uses confirmatory factor analysis to test for the convergent and discriminant validities of measures of interpersonal mentalizing. In Study 4, to identify the brain areas involved in interpersonal mentalizing and validate measures of the scale at the neural level, the authors use functional magnetic resonance imaging and use experimental treatments to compare salespeople identified as high versus low in interpersonal mentalizing skills, as measured by the SToM scale, and to pinpoint specific differences in neural processing. The results reveal three neural regions in which the activity is greater for salespeople with high (versus low) SToM scores: the right medial prefrontal cortex and the right and left temporo-parietal junctions. These regions are part of a distinct network of brain regions that have been shown to activate consistently with mentalizing tasks in prior studies on autism and neuroscience.
Biography
Roeland C. Dietvorst is a researcher in the Department of Marketing, School of Economics, at Erasmus University Rotterdam. He obtained a Master of Science in Biological and Cognitive Psychology in 2006 at the Erasmus University Rotterdam. His primary research interests are social cognitive neuroscience, neuroendocrinology, and neuroeconomics.
Willem J.M.I. Verbeke is Distinguished Professor in Sales and Account Management in the Department of Marketing, School of Economics, at Erasmus University Rotterdam. He is also founder and director of the Institute for Sales and Account Management at Erasmus University Rotterdam. He received his PhD from the School of Education at the University of Pennsylvania. His research interests are sales and account management, knowledge-based marketing, and neuroeconomics.
Richard P. Bagozzi is Dwight F. Benton Professor of Marketing in the Ross School of Business and Professor of Social and Administrative Sciences in the College of Pharmacy at the University of Michigan. Professor Bagozzi conducts basic research in human emotions, social identity, the theory of action, plural subject theory, and structural equation models and measurement. His applied research is in consumer behavior, sales force behavior, managerial action, organizational dynamics, health behaviors, and multivariate statistics. Professor Bagozzi earned his PhD at Northwestern University and has been awarded honorary doctorates from the University of Lausanne, Switzerland, and Antwerp University, Belgium. He has received the O’Dell and Maynard best-article awards and has been appointed fellow by the Association for Consumer Research and the Association for Psychological Science. Professor Bagozzi received the Irwin Distinguished Educator Award, the Churchill Lifetime Achievement Award, the Outstanding Marketing Educator of Award, and the Converse Award (twice).
Carolyn Yoon is Associate Professor of Marketing in the Stephen M. Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan. She is also affiliated with the Department of Psychology and the Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan. Yoon received her PhD from the Fuqua School of Business at Duke University. Her primary research interests are in the areas of consumer neuroscience, social and cognitive neurosciences, and cognition and aging.
Marion Smits is a radiologist at Erasmus MC–University Medical Center Rotterdam and subspecializes in neuroradiology. She recently received her PhD with distinction at Erasmus University. At Erasmus MC, she is responsible for all presurgical functional magnetic resonance imagining (fMRI) and diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) in brain tumor patients, coordinates several fMRI and DTI research projects on cognition and language, and collaborates on fMRI research with the Departments of Neuroscience, Neurology, Psychology, and Neuroeconomics.
Aad van der Lugt has been Associate Professor of Radiology at Erasmus MC–University Medical Center Rotterdam since August 2006 and head of the Neuroradiological Research Program since 2002. He graduated from the Erasmus MC Medical School in 1988. He received his PhD from Erasmus University in 1996. From 1996 to 2002, he was resident at the Department of Radiology at Erasmus MC. Since 2002, he has been employed as a neuroradiologist at Erasmus MC. His research interest has focused on vascular imaging, with an emphasis on the visualisation of the atherosclerotic disease in the carotid artery with ultrasound, CAT Scan, and magnetic resonance imagining. More recently, his research has focused on functional magnetic resonance imagining and imaging biomarkers in population-based studies.
Journal Marketing Research, Volume 46, Number 5, October 2009
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