Influences on the Illusory Truth Effect in Consumer Judgment

The Illusory Truth Effect: Exploring Implicit and Explicit Memory Influences on Consumer JudgmentsMaria L. CronleyMiami UniversityFrank R. KardesUniversity of CincinnatiScott A. HawkinsUniversity of TorontoRepetition does not seem like a sound basis for determining truth, but researchers have consistently found that people rate repeated statements as more true than non-repeated statements. This effect is known as the illusory truth effect and appears to be quite persistent. Following on previous work in memory and judgment, additional moderators of attention, exclusion, and subliminal exposure are investigated in two experiments to assess their effects on repetition-induced beliefs of validity for product claims. Results provide new insights into the processes of incidental learning and implicit memory use by which consumers form judgments based on repetitive persuasive messages

The benefits of deciding now and not later: The influence of the timing between acquiring knowledge and deciding on decision confidence, omission neglect bias, and choice deferral

Consumers often spend time searching before making a purchasing decision to acquire knowledge about products. If the purchasing decision is delayed, recall of acquired knowledge is likely to be impaired. Because products in the marketplace are rarely described completely, consumers who take too long to decide may fail to notice the absence of information relevant to a purchasing decision and fall prey to a phenomenon called ‘omission neglect’, an inability to detect missing information and form extreme and confidently held judgments. Omission neglect may be corrected by acquiring knowledge about the target product before making the choice. In the present research, we examine consumer decisions in the context of choice sets described incompletely and presented either immediately or a week after the acquisition of relevant information about a target product. Specifically, we investigate how the timing between product knowledge acquisition and decision-making affects the detection of missing information, decision confidence, and choice deferral. Across three experiments, we find that, after acquiring knowledge, when consumers have their decision delayed, they are less able to detect missing information, feel more confident, and defer choices less

Non-Conscious Influences on Consumer Choice

While consumer choice research has dedicated considerable research attention to aspects of choice that are deliberative and conscious, only limited attention has been paid to aspects of choice that occur outside of conscious awareness. We review relevant research that suggests that consumer choice is a mix of conscious and nonconscious influences, and argue that the degree to which nonconscious influences affect choice is much greater than many choice researchers believe. Across a series of research domains, these influences are found to include stimulus that are not consciously perceived by the consumer, nonconscious downstream effects of a consciously perceived stimuli or thought process, and decision processes that occur entirely outside of awareness

Conditioning Implicit and Explicit Brand Attitudes Using Celebrity Affiliates

Implicit attitudes may be important in understanding and predicting consumer behavior, especially in situations where consumers are cognitively constrained. Based on automatic affective associations, these attitudes guide behavior and may be resistant to persuasion. This article explores changes in implicit and explicit attitudes with Pavlovian conditioning using an emergent model of attitude change. Results suggest that Pavlovian conditioning with real brands and celebrities as conditioned and unconditioned stimuli, respectively, can have an effect on implicit attitudes. The article demonstrates a method for measuring implicit attitudes towards a single brand and discusses implications for implicit attitudes in consumer research

Persistent Preferences for Product Attributes: The Effects of the Initial Choice Context and Uninformative Experience

This research investigates the conditions under which persistent preferences for product attributes occur and the processes that lead to these effects. Our theoretical framework suggests that ambiguity in the context in which the initial choices are made determines the level of certainty in the initial preference. Certainty in the initial preference combines with uninformative additional experience to create a shift in the relevance of the attributes and biased information gathering in subsequent choices. These tendencies in turn lead to persistent preferences for the attributes of a previously chosen brand. In experiments 1A, 1B, and 1C, we varied the levels of ambiguity in the initial choice context and additional experience with a chosen brand and studied their effect on preference persistence. The findings offer support to the processes we propose. In experiment 2, we found that additional experience caused persistent preferences even for an irrelevant attribute as long as it was a differentiating attribute in the initial choice. Experiments 3 and 4 found that (a) the relative attractiveness of the chosen brand in the initial choice context and (b) a deliberation that compared the competing attributes in terms of thei