Participants and Procedure
Participants were 119 paid adults recruited using Amazon
Mechanical Turk (44% females; Mage p 32.72). After completing
a neutral filler task that entailed writing about their
day (Garg, Inman, and Mittal 2005), participants were informed
that they would be entered in a drawing to win a
$25 Amazon.com gift card that could be redeemed for five
downloadable movie rentals of their choice. Participants
were randomly assigned to see one of three gift cards: neutral,
whimsically cute (dots), and kindchenschema cute
(baby) design, which we created using the Amazon.com logo
(see fig. 3). In this study we chose a colorful circular pattern
for the whimsically cute gift card, consistent with prior research,
which has shown that circular geometrical shapes
and patterns are associated with playfulness and joy (Lundholm
1921) and that circular shapes can prime fundamental
human needs and increase the instances of prime-consistent
judgments and choices (Maimaran and Wheeler 2008; Zhu
and Argo 2013). After all responses were collected, one
participant won the $25 card drawing.