Biography:Joseph W. Alba

Joseph W. Alba is an American academic and consumer behavior scholar. He University of Florida Distinguished Professor of Marketing and chair of the Department of Marketing at the Warrington College of Business at the University of Florida.

Education and career

Alba received his B.A. in psychology (Summa Cum Laude) from the State University of New York-Albany and his PhD in Experimental Psychology in 1981. His dissertation advisor was Lynn Hasher. Alba has been a member of the faculty at the University of Florida since 1981.

He has served as President of the Association for Consumer Research. He is a fellow of the Association for Consumer Research, fellow of the Society for Consumer Psychology, and fellow of the American Psychological Association. He has received Society for Consumer Psychology’s Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award, the Paul D. Converse Award for outstanding contributions to the science of marketing, the Journal of Marketing’s Paul Root Award for outstanding article in the 1997 issue of that journal and Louis Stern Award for contributions to research on marketing channels.

Research interests

Alba studies the cognitive psychology of consumer decision making, particularly highlighting the roles of memory. His research has investigated various aspects of expertise, judgment and choice, brand equity, inference making, pricing, communication, and problem solving.

Expertise. Alba and J. Wesley Hutchinson’s paper “Dimensions of Consumer Expertise,” is often cited for its integrated treatment of the distinctions between familiarity and expertise and of expertise effects on cognitive effort, cognitive structure, analysis, elaboration, and memory. This paper set an agenda for the joint and separate research of Alba and Hutchinson and for many scholars in the field. The paper received many honors including Journal of Consumer Research Award for outstanding article in the 1987 volume of that journal, the 2008 Sheth / Journal of Consumer Research Award for long term contribution to consumer research.

Knowledge calibration. “Knowledge calibration” refers to having an understanding of how much one does and does not know, how connected one’s confidence is to the likelihood that one is actually correct.

Schema theory. Alba and Hasher proposed a prototypical schema theory of memory. Such a theory assumes the operation of four central encoding processes: selection, abstraction, interpretation and integration -- a process by which a single, holistic memory representation is formed from the products of the three previous operations. The article evaluated the supportive and critical evidence for these processes in light of the need for any theory of memory to account for three fundamental observations: accuracy, incompleteness, and distortion. The central retrieval process of schema theory, reconstruction, is also discussed in this context. Evidence seems to indicate that the memory representation is far richer and more detailed that schema theory would suggest. Many effects that had been attributed to schematic effects on encoding were found to be better interpreted in terms of retrieval.

Part list cuing. In general, cues facilitate recall, but in the phenomenon of part-list cuing, cues that come from a part of the set of items to be retained actually hurt recall. What explains when cues help and when they hurt? For example, in Prakash Nedungadi’s work on memory factors in consideration set formation, cuing one brand in a subcategory often facilitated recall of other brands in the same category – seemingly at odds with part-list cuing. Alba and Chattopadhyay provided evidence suggesting that the effects of cues on memory depend on the strength of two offsetting forces. Cues help recall by getting a consumer into a category or subcategory. But once a subcategory has been retrieved, further exemplars inhibit retrieval of the remainder. Alba and Chattopadhyay demonstrated this by showing that the effect of cues on recall depended on the fineness of consumers’ category structures. When there are many categories with a small number of members in each, cues have a more positive (or less negative) effect than when there are few categories with many members in each.