The same quantity can be expressed at different levels of granularity, for example, “1 year,” “12 months,” or “365 days.” Consumers attend to the granularity chosen by a communicator and draw pragmatic inferences that influence judgment and choice. They consider estimates expressed...

Two studies examine how different emotions of the same valence influence product evaluation when products make specific emotional claims. Vacation products with adventurous (serene) appeals were evaluated more favorably when participants felt excited (peaceful) rather than peaceful (excited)....

Self-reports are a key source of information in consumer research. Unfortunately, self-reports are highly context dependent, and this problem is compounded when comparisons across cohorts or cultures are of interest. Age-related changes in cognitive functioning and cultural differences in...

Telling people that a consumer claim is false can make them misremember it as true. In two experiments, older adults were especially susceptible to this "illusion of truth" effect. Repeatedly identifying a claim as false helped older adults remember it as false in the short term but...

Marketing research surveys often elicit behavioral frequency reports. When estimating the number of times a respondent engages in a behavior, s/he may use information about the behavior stored in memory, information provided by the response context, or both. Based on an...

Three experiments show that semantic primes can enhance perceptual fluency, resulting in higher liking of the perceived product. Specifically, semantic primes that cue the visual identifier of one of two products (e.g., a bottle of wine with a frog shown on the label) increase preference of the...

Attitudes are hypothetical constructs invented by researchers to explain phenomena of interest. Their appeal reflects the common preference for dispositional explanations. Construal models account for the same phenomena without assuming enduring predispositions and are better suited to...

This analysis introduces the Presenter’s Paradox. Robust findings in impression formation demonstrate that perceivers’ judgments show a weighted averaging pattern, which results in less favorable evaluations when mildly favorable information is added to highly favorable information. Across...