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Uniting the Tribes of Fluency to Form a Metacognitive Nation
Abstract
Processing fluency, or the subjective experience of ease with which people process information, reliably influences people's judgments across a broad range of social dimensions. Experimenters have manipulated processing fluency using a vast array of techniques, which, despite their diversity, produce remarkably similar judgmental consequences. For example, people similarly judge stimuli that are semantically primed (conceptual fluency), visually clear (perceptual fluency), and phonologically simple (linguistic fluency) as more true than their less fluent counterparts. The authors offer the first comprehensive review of such mechanisms and their implications for judgment and decision making. Because every cognition falls along a continuum from effortless to demanding and generates a corresponding fluency experience, the authors argue that fluency is a ubiquitous metacognitive cue in reasoning and social judgment.
... In contrast, rather than imagining people are truly so credulous, another set of theoretical accounts attributes illusory truth effects to metacognitive experiences of fluency or familiarity [2], rather than genuine influences on beliefs. Research on metacognition has shown that people's behaviour and judgements are not only influenced by the content of their thoughts but also by the phenomenological experience of processing those thoughts [16,17]. Metacognitive processing 'fluency' is the experienced ease of processing or thinking about information [16,18]. ...
... Research on metacognition has shown that people's behaviour and judgements are not only influenced by the content of their thoughts but also by the phenomenological experience of processing those thoughts [16,17]. Metacognitive processing 'fluency' is the experienced ease of processing or thinking about information [16,18]. When thinking is easy and fluent, people tend to judge the targets of that thinking more favourably than if thinking is challenging and disfluent [19]. ...
... Current accounts have not developed such a theory (e.g. [16,30]), and it appears unlikely to be workable: people frequently encounter chains of statements invoking different concepts, yet they do so seemingly without issue, as considering one topic does not necessarily make it more difficult to consider another unrelated topic. ...
Numerous psychological findings have shown that incidental exposure to ideas makes those ideas seem more true, a finding commonly referred to as the ‘illusory truth’ effect. Under many accounts of the illusory truth effect, initial exposure to a statement provides a metacognitive feeling of ‘fluency’ or familiarity that, upon subsequent exposure, leads people to infer that the statement is more likely to be true. However, genuine beliefs do not only affect truth judgements about individual statements, they also imply other beliefs and drive decision-making. Here, we consider whether exposure to ‘premise’ statements affects people’s truth ratings for novel ‘implied’ statements, a pattern of findings we call the ‘illusory implication’ effect. We argue these effects would constitute evidence for genuine belief change from incidental exposure and identify a handful of existing findings that offer preliminary support for this claim. Building upon these, we conduct three new preregistered experiments to further test this hypothesis, finding additional evidence that exposure to ‘premise’ statements affected participants’ truth ratings for novel ‘implied’ statements, including for considerably more distant implications than those previously explored. Our findings suggest that the effects of incidental exposure reach further than previously thought, with potentially consequential implications for concerns around mis- and dis-information.
... Schwarz et al., 1991). Importantly, a metaanalysis revealed that regardless of how processing fluency is manipulated, it usually has the same impacts (Alter and Oppenheimer, 2009). Specifically, a more fluent experience feels good and generally leads to more positive evaluations of the issue-at-hand (Schwarz, 2011), including feelings of efficacy (Shulman and Sweitzer, 2018). ...
... Specifically, a more fluent experience feels good and generally leads to more positive evaluations of the issue-at-hand (Schwarz, 2011), including feelings of efficacy (Shulman and Sweitzer, 2018). Given that processing fluency has been successfully targeted in experimental work (refer to Alter and Oppenheimer, 2009), and given that fluency has been associated with efficacy, it stands to reason that targeting communication efficacy through a fluency induction may increase feelings of efficacy and intentions to seek information about family health. ...
... Given this study's focus on family health history, we opted for a retrieval task manipulation by asking participants to recall either a few pieces of information (easy), many pieces of information (difficult) about family health information, or no information (control). This induction has been successful in prior research (Alter and Oppenheimer, 2009), and has core ties to the metacognition literature. Perhaps more importantly, this type of intervention is very common; health professionals routinely inquire about family health history during visits (Nichol et al., 2023). ...
Drawing from the metacognitive literature, this experimental study examines how the relative ease of retrieving information (i.e. processing fluency) impacts individuals’ efficacy about engaging in family health discussions and interpersonal information seeking intention across two health topics: family organ donation status and family health history. Participants ( N = 609) were randomly assigned to one of three conditions. Those in the easy retrieval task condition (versus a difficult or no task control), who were asked to recall information regarding two (versus six or zero) family members, reported greater processing fluency. Moreover, those who reported greater fluency also reported higher communication efficacy, and a greater intention to seek out family health information. Practically, this study highlights how metacognitive strategies may be used in healthcare settings to motivate patient information seeking. For example, it may be advantageous to start by collecting information for relatively few diseases/family members and slowly build a family history over time.
... All cognitive experiencessuch as reading text or listening to someone speak have a metacognitive dimension that reflects how easy or difficult people feel that experience was. This is captured in the construct of processing fluency, which is conceptualized as the subjective ease or difficulty of a cognitive task or experience (Alter & Oppenheimer, 2009). Generally, more fluent processing is associated with more positive affect and more positive outcomes (e.g., evaluations of tasks and sources), and less fluent processing is associated with more negative affect and evaluative outcomes (Dragojevic, 2020). ...
... This is proposed to occur via two mechanisms. First, people are proposed to have (implicit) "naïve theories" about what fluency representsfor instance, that a fluent processing experience suggests something is familiar or correct (Alter & Oppenheimer, 2009). In the context of this study, students may believe that fluent processing (i.e., ease using and getting useful feedback from ChatGPT) indicates that a tool is helpful or valuable, while disfluent processing (i.e., difficulty using and getting useful feedback from ChatGPT) indicates the opposite. ...
... The third and final dimension is the (processing) fluency of students' interactions with the tool. This construct, which comes from research in psychology (Alter & Oppenheimer, 2009), captures the subjective ease with which students got feedback from ChatGPT, and the clarity and comprehensibility of that feedback. To improve processing fluency in students' interactions with digital assistants like ChatGPT, a key issue is prompt quality. ...
The recent advent of AI-based digital assistants such as ChatGPT offers the potential for a new tool in the instructional “toolbox” for EAP courses. We report on a retrospective survey of students’ experiences using ChatGPT in first- and second-year EAP core writing courses at a continental European university. Students reported that they saw ChatGPT as a social agent, had moderately fluent experiences interacting with it, and had moderately positive perceptions of ChatGPT as an instructional tool. Both self-reported fluency of the interaction and perceptions of ChatGPT’s social agentic qualities were positively associated with perceptions of ChatGPT’s value as an instructional tool. Students reported that ChatGPT was less helpful than their professors, and neither more nor less helpful than their peers. Implications for EAP instruction are discussed.
... 29 Based on Graf et al. (2018) and Alter and Oppenheimer (2009), no differentiation between various dimensions of fluency (e.g., perceptual, conceptual) is made here. Instead, processing fluency is regarded as a general, "ubiquitous metacognitive cue in reasoning and social judgment" (Alter & Oppenheimer, 2009, p. 219), as "every cognition falls along a continuum from effortless to demanding and generates a corresponding fluency experience [exerting] the same influence on judgments independently of how it is generated" (Alter & Oppenheimer, 2009, p. 219). ...
... 29 Based on Graf et al. (2018) and Alter and Oppenheimer (2009), no differentiation between various dimensions of fluency (e.g., perceptual, conceptual) is made here. Instead, processing fluency is regarded as a general, "ubiquitous metacognitive cue in reasoning and social judgment" (Alter & Oppenheimer, 2009, p. 219), as "every cognition falls along a continuum from effortless to demanding and generates a corresponding fluency experience [exerting] the same influence on judgments independently of how it is generated" (Alter & Oppenheimer, 2009, p. 219). ...
... 29 Based on Graf et al. (2018) and Alter and Oppenheimer (2009), no differentiation between various dimensions of fluency (e.g., perceptual, conceptual) is made here. Instead, processing fluency is regarded as a general, "ubiquitous metacognitive cue in reasoning and social judgment" (Alter & Oppenheimer, 2009, p. 219), as "every cognition falls along a continuum from effortless to demanding and generates a corresponding fluency experience [exerting] the same influence on judgments independently of how it is generated" (Alter & Oppenheimer, 2009, p. 219). ...
Kindchenschema (or baby schema)—a set of physical features characteristic of human and animal babies, such as big, round eyes, a large head in proportion to the body, and round, protruding checks—attracts our attention, is perceived as rewarding and cute, and triggers approach motivation. While the concept of Kindchenschema has been extensively studied from the perspective of general psychology, how Kindchenschema-cues affect consumers in the context of food packaging has hardly received any scholarly attention. This is surprising, given how frequently consumers are exposed to such cues when shopping for food: kittens on beer cans, adorable puppies on boxes of chocolates, cuddly polar bears on a package of hot dog buns, to name just a few of the many examples. Considering that packaging cues can significantly affect consumers at different levels of behavior, one thus has to wonder: How do Kindchenschema-cues on food packaging affect consumers? Based on an extensive review of theoretical and empirical literature from various scientific disciplines and using different methods, this question was addressed in the present dissertation.
As the concepts of Kindchenschema and sweetness share many associations, it was proposed that consumers would apply a “Kindchenschema-sweetness”-heuristic when evaluating food products and when making decisions pertaining to these products. These propositions were investigated in five online and five laboratory experiments (Ntotal > 1,600), focusing on different consumer-related processes and outcomes.
As demonstrated by results of these studies, Kindchenschema packaging design increases consumers’ expectations about and actual perceptions of the sweetness of food products and beverages, and, contingent on high sweetness preferences, even purchase intention. Depending on the predominant taste quality of a product, Kindchenschema-stimuli also affect perceptions of congruency and processing fluency, which are higher for sweet than for salty or savory products. Consumers’ use of the aforementioned heuristic even impacts visual attention and decision-making processes under conditions of uncertainty and time pressure, further illustrating the profound effects of Kindchenschema packaging design.
Overall, this dissertation meaningfully contributes to and extends research in the fields of consumer psychology, sensory science, and marketing. The results presented in this thesis are also relevant from a practical standpoint and can guide marketing practices such as packaging design and product positioning. Last but not least, this research can be of interest from the perspective of consumer and health policy as well as from the perspective of the individual consumer.
... The reason for this is because processing fluency is associated with effort. Because recalling many examples is more effortful than recalling few examples, processing fluency has been found to decrease as more examples are required (see Alter and Oppenheimer, 2009). Thus, taken together, the presentation of information, whether through message design or repetition, or engaging in a task that may be cognitively easy or difficult, can impact feelings of processing fluency. ...
... In this way, we can understand how metacognition, independent of misinformation type or content, can impact how critically people evaluate subsequent information. Guided by our discussion on the different approaches to instantiating a state of fluency (for a review of manipulations: Alter and Oppenheimer, 2009), we chose to manipulate processing fluency in two ways. Specifically, we chose a language complexity manipulation (Shulman and Sweitzer, 2018) and a thought retrieval task (Schwarz et al., 1991). ...
... The thought retrieval task will ask participants to list either two leaders of technology companies (easy condition) or eight leaders (difficult condition). Importantly, both of these approaches are consistent with previous processing fluency inductions (Alter and Oppenheimer, 2009). That said, although we use two manipulations, to better understand the generalizability and potential nuances of these methodological decisions (see Slater and Gleason, 2012, for a discussion of the benefits of multiple manipulations), we predict the same relationship with processing fluency. ...
This experiment (N = 1,019) examined how a state of processing fluency, induced through either an easy or difficult task (reading a simple vs. complex message or recalling few vs. many examples) impacted participants’ ability to subsequently detect misinformation. The results revealed that, as intended, easier tasks led to higher reports of processing fluency. In turn, increased processing fluency was positively associated with internal efficacy. Finally, internal efficacy was positively related to misinformation detection using a signal detection task. This work suggests that feelings of ease while processing information can promote confidence and a more discerning style of information processing. Given the proliferation of misinformation online, an understanding of how metacognitions – like processing fluency – can disrupt the tacit acceptance of information carries important democratic and normative implications.
... When engaging in any sort of cognition, humans subconsciously evaluate several experiential factors about their cognitive process-such as how easy it was to retrieve the necessary information (Thompson et al., 2013), how easily they were able to perceive the relevant stimuli (Reber & Schwarz, 1999), or how familiar aspects of the task felt (Alter & Oppenheimer, 2008). These cues generate a sense of fluency, a subjective experience of how easy it was to engage in the task (Alter & Oppenheimer, 2009;Oppenheimer, 2008). When fluency is low, humans can often tell that something just does not feel right. ...
... On the surface, it seems reasonable to conclude that because generative chatbots do not have feelings-which they readily admit when asked-they would not be able to experience fluency or disfluency in the way that humans do. 1 This lack of metacognitive feedback is a key difference between human experts and generative chatbots. While humans may overlook smaller errors that generative chatbots are good at detecting (e.g., typos), metacognitive disfluency allows humans to sense when something is just not right with the information that they are processing (Alter & Oppenheimer, 2009;Oppenheimer, 2008). This document is copyrighted by the American Psychological Association or one of its allied publishers. ...
Despite their ability to answer complex questions, it is unclear whether generative chatbots should be considered experts in any domain. There are several important cognitive and metacognitive differences that separate human experts from generative chatbots. First, human experts’ domain knowledge is deep, efficiently structured, adaptive, and intuitive—whereas generative chatbots’ knowledge is shallow and inflexible, leading to errors that human experts would rarely make. Second, generative chatbots lack access to critical metacognitive capacities that allow humans to detect errors in their own thinking and communicate this information to others. Though generative chatbots may surpass human experts in the future—for now, the nature of their knowledge structures and metacognition prevent them from reaching true expertise.
... Fluency, the subjective ease of processing a stimulus, can influence many cognitive judgments including, truth, liking, confidence, and prior experience (Alter & Oppenheimer, 2009). For recognition memory in particular, items can be recognized based on an assessment of familiarity, which is augmented by fluency (e.g., Whittlesea & Williams, 2001a, 2001b, or on the recollection of specific details (Yonelinas, 2002). ...
... First, what defines a fluency-neutral baseline (i.e., control) condition? This is a theoretically important issue to resolve given that fluency and disfluency are associated with different cognitive decisions of many types (e.g., Alter & Oppenheimer, 2009). Fluency is a relative term; therefore, a fluency-neutral control is needed to precisely measure when fluency increases or decreases, and effective baseline conditions have proven useful to understand fluency effects (Leynes et al., 2017;Leynes & Mok, 2020). ...
Masked word repetition (priming) increases "old" responses on an episodic recognition test, which has been attributed to more fluent target processing. Such results hinge on comparisons to a control prime that is "fluency-neutral". A common practice is to use unrelated word primes for this purpose when some evidence suggests that they actually decrease target word processing fluency (disfluency). ERP and behavioral measures were collected in three experiments that used non-letter symbols as a fluency-neutral control and match primes to increase processing fluency. Experiment 1 compared unrelated word primes and orthographically dissimilar nonword primes to determine whether these primes cause disfluency. Experiment 2 contrasted orthographically dissimilar and similar nonword primes. Experiment 3 examined semantically related primes to test theoretical predictions derived from Experiments 1 and 2. All three experiments provide evidence that the FN400 and N400 are distinct ERP components because many primes altered only one of the components. Relative to the control condition, match (Exps 1 & 2) and semantic primes selectively affected N400 amplitudes, whereas unrelated word primes and orthographically dissimilar nonword primes selectively affected FN400 amplitudes. The Unexpected Fluency Attribution model (Mecklinger & Bader, 2020) provides a framework for understanding the cognitive processes associated with each ERP component.
... The term "processing fluency" can be thought of as an umbrella term for all phenomena related to the subjective ease of information processing (Oppenheimer, 2008), with different sources producing different types of fluency, such as perceptual, conceptual or linguistic fluency, to name a few (Alter & Oppenheimer, 2009). Fluency can be achieved through multiple means, such as altering visual characteristics specific to the stimulus, e.g., symmetry, contrast, simplicity or self-similarity . ...
... Given that processing fluency presents itself in multiple forms (Alter & Oppenheimer, 2009), we examined the prevalence of the different types of fluency in relation to aesthetic reactions to auditory stimuli. If no specific type was mentioned in the articles, we considered it to be general fluency. ...
Processing fluency has been shown to affect how people aesthetically evaluate stimuli. While this effect is well documented for visual stimuli, the evidence accumulated for auditory stimuli has not yet been integrated. Our aim was to examine the relevant research on how processing fluency affects the aesthetic appreciation of auditory stimuli and to identify the extant knowledge gaps in this body of evidence. This scoping review of 19 studies reported across 13 articles found that, similarly to visual stimuli, fluency has a positive effect on liking of auditory stimuli. Additionally, we identified certain elements that impede the generalizability of the current research on the relationship between fluency and aesthetic reactions to auditory stimuli, such as a lack of consistency in the number of repeated exposures, the tendency to omit the affective component and the failure to account for personal variables such as musical abilities developed through musical training or the participants' personality or preferences. These results offer a starting point in developing novel and proper processing fluency manipulations of auditory stimuli and suggest several avenues for future research aiming to clarify the impact and importance of processing fluency and disfluency in this domain.
... Novelty is often preferred over familiarity in various settings 61,62 , therefore suggesting that one's inherent preference for novelty might explain why stylistically dissimilar language patterns are associated with more positive attitudes than stylistically similar language patterns. Another possibility is that hearing a communication style that is dissimilar to one's own is cognitively difficult and challenging to understand 63,64 . Those who have an interest and motivation to engage in such complex thinking (e.g., people with a greater need for cognition; 65 ) may therefore positively appraise entertainment media from people whose style is unlike their own. ...
Prior work suggests people often match with conversational partners by using a common rate of style words (e.g., articles, pronouns). Indeed, such language style matching (LSM) has associated positively with downstream social and psychological dynamics like cooperation, liking, and well-being. To what degree is LSM predictive of positive attitudes in entertainment media settings? The current two-study paper addressed this question by collecting participants’ writing style with three diverse prompts, and then having them consume a random selection of TED talks (Study 1) and videotaped podcast narratives (Study 2). The evidence suggested less LSM was associated with positive attitudes (e.g., an interest in watching another video by the speaker, feeling connected to the speaker). Mediation analyses revealed the negative relationship between LSM and positive attitudes was explained by one’s novelty need satisfaction. Implications for LSM research, plus character construction and narrative development in media psychology, are discussed.
... the smoothness of between-syllable transitions (glide vs. non-glide)(Alter & Oppenheimer, 2009), and (3) the rhythmicity of phonological rhetoric (alliteration, assonance, or consonance is present vs. absent)(McGlone & Tofighbakhsh, 2000). ...
Building trust is always seen as a firm’s long-term goal. Yet, little is known about creating a credible brand by taking brand name pronounceability design as the starting point. Diverse strategies of brand name pronounceability design widely exist in marketing practice; some are fairly easy to pronounce, while others are strange and mouthful (e.g., “Deloitte” versus “Ernst & Young”). Three main studies were conducted to explore the effect. Drawing on the perceptual fluency/misattribution (PF/M) model, the current research suggests that brand name pronounceability boosts misattribution to ad truthiness, leading to better evaluations of brand credibility. However, this influence does not extend to contexts when the brand name is subtly presented. This research (1) provides deep insight into the dimensions of brand name pronounceability, (2) refines the application perspectives of the PF/M model, and (3) critically supplements the research stream of brand name pronounceability aftereffects. Also, our findings provide practical guidance for marketers and brand managers.
... Although there are many explanations for this effect, the most common, as with truth judgments, relies on the fluency that comes from repetition (see Montoya et al., 2017). Furthermore, research shows that fluency from repetition can be misattributed to a wide variety of judgments even beyond greater truth and desirability (Alter & Oppenheimer, 2009;Mandler et al., 1987). Thus, there is similarity in the effect of repetition in each domain, including the postulated mechanism. ...
Research on misinformation has exploded over the past decade in psychology and other disciplines. Much research has been conducted about which variables are associated with the initial acceptance of misinformation (i.e., false statements such as “Venice is the capital of Italy”) and which variables are associated with its correction (“No. Rome is the capital of Italy”). A largely independent literature exists about which variables are associated with the initial acceptance of attitudinal claims (i.e., opinion statements such as “Rome is a beautiful city”) and their correction (e.g., “No, Rome is not a beautiful city”). This article addresses whether the variables impacting the acceptance of factual claims (often expressed as truth judgments) and opinion claims (often expressed as evaluative judgments) are the same. Concluding that these assessments are mostly impacted similarly by the same variables (e.g., source credibility, claim repetition), it is argued that these two seemingly separate literatures should be integrated into one science of persuasion, at least for studies aimed at making general contributions. Finally, findings from the attitudes literature that potentially can inform the misinformation literature and vice versa are discussed.
... According to feelings as information theory, the metacognitive experience of processing commercial stimuli itself could serve as important source of information for making inference and judgment about the authenticity, quality, beauty of the target stimuli (Schwarz, 2012;Schwarz et al., 2021). Especially, the feeling of high processing fluency, or the feeling that information can be brought to mind and processed easily, can be considered as one of the most important meta-cognitive cues that facilitates positive inference and judgment (Alter & Oppenheimer, 2009;Schwarz, 2004). The pleasant experience of perceived ease may be misattributed as focal stimuli, with judgement made on effortlessly processed stimulus tends to be perceived as being more authentic, credible, less risky and pleasant (Schwarz, 2004;Schwarz et al., 2021), which further leads to more favorable consumption choice and decisions. ...
With the growing popularity of live streaming shopping, designing an effective live streaming commercial strategy is a focus for retailers as well as researchers. Drawing on stimulus-organic-response model and feeling-as-information theory, the current study explores the role of congruence between live streaming elements and the product in facilitating shopping intention in live streaming shopping context. A total of 543 customers who engaged in live streaming shopping in the past three months were surveyed and asked to reflect on one recent experience for completing the questionnaire. We conducted a series of confirmatory factor analyses to ascertain the research constructs’ reliability and validity. Furthermore, structural equation modeling was performed to test the research hypotheses. By distinguishing three forms of congruence between commercial elements and products (that between products and live stream content, atmosphere, and streamer, respectively), we found that a higher fit of live streaming elements with the product contributed to higher purchase intention via improved processing fluency and increased perceived authenticity of the product. From a cognitive perspective, our findings enrich the understanding of congruence between key live commercial elements and products. Specifically, our study highlights the significance of contextual stimuli in live streaming, by demonstrating its effectiveness in promoting sales through a cognitive friendly consumption experience. Additionally, it offers practical insights for optimizing design and sales promotion in the live streaming environment.
... these measures served as proxies for adoption. To test Hypothesis 2, we next gauged processing disfluency by using measures typical of this literature (Alter & Oppenheimer, 2009; A. Y. Lee & Aaker, 2004;Schwarz, 2004). We asked: How complex was this talk? ...
What makes cultural products such as edutainment (i.e., online talks) successful versus not? Asked differently, which characteristics make certain addresses more (vs. less) appealing? Across 12 field and lab studies, we explore when, why, and for whom the information load carried in TED talks causes them to gain (vs. lose) popularity. First and foremost, we uncover a negative effect whereby increases in the number of topics broached in a talk (i.e., information load) hurt viewer adoption. The cause? Processing disfluency. As information load soars, content becomes more difficult to process, which in turn reduces interest. Probing process further, we show this effect fades among audience members with greater need for cognition, a personality trait marking a penchant for deep and broad information processing. Similarly, the effect fades among edutainment viewers favoring education goals (i.e., cognitive enrichment) whereas it amplifies among those favoring entertainment (i.e., hedonic pleasure). Our investigation also documents the counterintuitiveness of our findings (i.e., how individuals mispredict which talks they would actually [dis]like). From these results, we derive theoretical insights for processing fluency research and the psychology of cultural products adoption (i.e., we weigh in on when, why, and for whom fluency has favorable vs. unfavorable downstream effects). We also derive prescriptive insights for (a) players of the edutainment industry whose very business hinges on curating appealing content (e.g., TED, Talks@Google, The Moth, Big Think, Spotify) and (b) communicators of all creeds wishing to broaden their reach and appeal (e.g., professors, scientists, politicians, journalists, bloggers, podcasters, content editors, online community managers).
... Brown (1980) generalizes the comprehension monitoring of skilled readers, whose "top-down and bottom-up skills are so fluent that they can proceed merrily on automatic pilot, until a triggering event alerts them to comprehension failure" and they enter a debugging state in which they actively adjust their approach in order to repair comprehension (p.455). The subjective experience of reading 'merrily on autopilot' is known as processing fluency (also referring more broadly to any experience of ease of information processing), and readers are sensitive to the shift from this state into disfluency (Alter & Oppenheimer, 2009). ...
... Scholars argue that ITE persists because repetitive exposure to particular information increases the processing fluency or ease of processing that information at a later time. In other words, people inadvertently use processing fluency as a heuristic mechanism to determine the veracity of a claim (Alter & Oppenheimer, 2009;Wang et al., 2016;Whittlesea, 1993). This understanding is rooted in a more fundamental idea that we are cognitive misers and default to mental shortcuts to conserve our limited mental energy, as opposed to deliberating over each judgment and decision (Fiske & Russell, 2010;Kahneman, 2011). ...
... Including alternative discourse on topics of the societal divide may prevent people from uncritically accepting parroted points as true. That is, if individuals are presented with the same information repeatedly, the processing of this information increases in fluency, which promotes a sense of familiarity, liking, and safety (Alter & Oppenheimer, 2009), that causes people to experience such statements as a personally felt truth (Reber & Unkelbach, 2010). By presenting a more diversified set of opinions and facts, or by allowing news consumers to set their preferred mixture of news, the uncritical acceptance of such statements and the prejudice toward dissenting individuals may be effectively reduced (Pearson & Dovidio, 2013). ...
Against the backdrop of the Covid‐19 pandemic, this article undertakes a critical evaluation of a series of shortcomings of the view of conspiracy theories that is predominant among scholars and the general public. Reviewing numerous studies on the topic, we critically assess: (a) how justified the claim is that we are in a conspiracy‐thinking emergency, (b) how the label of conspiracy theorist can be used strategically to delegitimize heterodox views, and (c) the practical consequences, for academic research and the well‐functioning of democracies, of unpopular ideas being labeled as conspiratorial. The empirical sources reviewed here suggest that beliefs in conspiracy theories have not increased over time and are less consequential than commonly believed, even in times of a global pandemic. Instead, the concept of conspiracy theory has become more prevalent and its derogatory connotation evokes a stigma that tilts the playing field against dissenting viewpoints. The stigmatization and political leveraging of this notion, we argue, lead to biases not only in the public discussion on various sensitive topics but also in the academic literature on conspiracy theories themselves. We analyze these academic blind spots in light of the diminishing political diversity in academia and recent perspectives on soft censorship. We propose to complement the research on conspiracy theorists with an analysis of individuals at the opposite end of the spectrum, who are inclined to uncritically trust institutional authorities and are prejudiced against heterodox opinions. Proposed solutions include promoting balanced news coverage, fostering critical thinking through debates, and piercing information bubbles to provide access to diverse perspectives.
... This mode of information processing is characterized by minimal cognitive effort and reliance on mental shortcuts, such as heuristics, to make judgments or decisions [36]. Superficial processing is influenced by factors such as cognitive load, time constraints, and cognitive fluency [37,38]. Individuals engaging in superficial information processing may be susceptible to misinformation due to their tendency to overlook nuances, inconsistencies, or inaccuracies in the information presented [11]. ...
Background
Social media platforms have transformed the dissemination of health information, allowing for rapid and widespread sharing of content. However, alongside valuable medical knowledge, these platforms have also become channels for the spread of health misinformation, including false claims and misleading advice, which can lead to significant public health risks. Susceptibility to health misinformation varies and is influenced by individuals’ cultural, social, and personal backgrounds, further complicating efforts to combat its spread.
Objective
This study aimed to examine the extent to which individuals report encountering health-related misinformation on social media and to assess how racial, ethnic, and sociodemographic factors influence susceptibility to such misinformation.
Methods
Data from the Health Information National Trends Survey (HINTS; Cycle 6), conducted by the National Cancer Institute with 5041 US adults between March and November 2022, was used to explore associations between racial and sociodemographic factors (age, gender, race/ethnicity, annual household income, marital status, and location) and susceptibility variables, including encounters with misleading health information on social media, difficulty in assessing information truthfulness, discussions with health providers, and making health decisions based on such information.
Results
Over 35.61% (1740/4959) of respondents reported encountering “a lot” of misleading health information on social media, with an additional 45% (2256/4959) reporting seeing “some” amount of health misinformation. Racial disparities were evident in comparison with Whites, with non-Hispanic Black (odds ratio [OR] 0.45, 95% CI 0.33-0.6, P<.01) and Hispanic (OR 0.54, 95% CI 0.41-0.71, P<.01) individuals reporting lower odds of finding deceptive information, while Hispanic (OR 1.68, 95% CI 1.48-1.98, P<.05) and non-Hispanic Asian (OR 1.96, 95% CI 1.21-3.18, P<.01) individuals exhibited higher odds in having difficulties in assessing the veracity of health information found on social media. Hispanic and Asian individuals were more likely to discuss with providers and make health decisions based on social media information. Older adults aged ≥75 years exhibited challenges in assessing health information on social media (OR 0.63, 95% CI 0.43-0.93, P<.01), while younger adults (18-34) showed increased vulnerability to health misinformation. In addition, income levels were linked to higher exposure to health misinformation on social media: individuals with annual household incomes between US 75,000 (OR 1.74, 95% CI 1.14-2.68, P<.01), and greater than US $75,000 (OR 1.78, 95% CI 1.20-2.66, P<.01) exhibited greater odds, revealing complexities in decision-making and information access.
Conclusions
This study highlights the pervasive presence of health misinformation on social media, revealing vulnerabilities across racial, age, and income groups, underscoring the need for tailored interventions.
... Given that individuals already have more positive affective evaluations and trust of their ingroup as opposed to out-group members (Otten & Moskowitz, 2000;Yuki et al., 2005), and individuals have more negative expectations about encounters with outgroup members (Mallett et al., 2008;Plant, 2004), decreasing processing fluency when encountering an out-group member or a representation of an out-group member could have counterproductive effects. Indeed, work from metacognition (for reviews see Alter & Oppenheimer, 2009;Schwarz, 2011Schwarz, , 2015 finds that a difficult processing experience engenders negative attitudes toward the focus of ones' attention. Conversely, an easy experience-prompted by simplicity-produces more positive evaluations of the subject matter (i.e., the simpler-is-better hypothesis, Markowitz & Shulman, 2021;Shulman et al., 2020;Shulman & Sweitzer, 2018). ...
This experiment (N = 1,241) investigates the impact of code-mixing, defined as the use of more than one language, on processing fluency, narrative engagement, and cross-cultural attitudes. Using a sample of native English speakers located in the United States, we found that narratives that include code-mixing, a common feature of intercultural communication, felt more difficult to process and, in turn, led to more negative out-group bias and less narrative engagement. These findings integrate and extend intercultural communication and narrative theory and consider the challenges and opportunities that accompany diverse representations of characters in storytelling. Rather than highlight these challenges, however, we consider theoretically based strategies to improve audiences’ reception to cross cultural content and, in doing so, hope to inform communication practices that lead to a greater regard for others.
... Proust calls the left disjunct of her definition, where one subsystem evaluates another without representing it, "procedural metacognition." In procedural metacognition, judgments are inferred from various cues and are not based on explicit meta-representations. 5 Some of the most important cues are one's familiarity with a certain input, the ease of processing some information, or the general fluency that occurs when, e.g., a subject attempts to recollect a particular memory item (see Alter & Oppenheimer, 2009). 6 For instance, I might have a tipof-the-tongue experience when thinking about Mark Twain's birth name not because I have a partial representation of the answer, but merely because the name "Mark Twain" sounds familiar to me. ...
In recent papers, Peter Carruthers and others have argued that the feeling of uncertainty is not metacognitive (i.e., it is not elicited by second-order cognitive appraisals) but is elicited solely by first-order likelihood estimates—a probability account of the feeling of uncertainty. In this paper, I make a case for why a probability account is sufficient to explain neither the feeling of uncertainty nor the feeling of certainty in self-reflecting humans. I argue first that humans’ feelings of (un)certainty vary in ways that their probability estimates on the matter do not, and second that probability accounts elide the essentially epistemic nature of epistemic feelings.
... A key strand within the congruity theory literature emphasizes a fluency-driven account of the congruity effect, highlighting how congruence between stimuli enhances processing fluency which can provoke positive affect and favorable responses (Alter & Oppenheimer, 2009;Jiang et al., 2020;Mandler, 1982). Indeed, the ease of processing brought by stimuli congruity can evoke positive affective states, often referred to as a ''warm glow'' (Winkielman & Huber, 2009). ...
Service providers frequently use pronouns to enhance communication effectiveness and build stronger relationships with their customers. However, the tourism literature is silent on the effect of pronouns in sustainable tourism marketing messages. Drawing on congruity theory, this research addresses this gap by exploring the role of first-person pronouns (i.e., singular vs. plural) in promoting travelers' pro-environmental behavioral intention. Study one indicates that under the communal relationship norm, sustainable messages using first-person singular (vs. plural) pronouns can generate higher levels of pro-environmental behavioral intention, whereas sustainable messages adopting first-person plural (vs. singular) pronouns are more persuasive under the exchange relationship norm. Study two indicates that for personal hosts, sustainable messages using singular (vs. plural) first-person pronouns lead to higher levels of pro-environmental behavioral intention, whereas sustainable messages using plural (vs. singular) first-person pronouns are more effective for commercial hosts. Furthermore, perceived message appropriateness and warm glow are identified as the underlying mechanisms explaining these effects. Our findings guide tourism practitioners to promote customers' pro-environmental behaviors by using personal pronouns in sustainable messages.
... However, according to the conceptual fluency explanation for repetition, both verbatim and non-verbatim repetition should have similar increases in processing fluency (42,45). Therefore, we predict that: ...
Large Language Models (LLMs) have the potential to enhance message features and exploit cognitive heuristics to increase the persuasiveness of strategic information campaigns. In this paper, we focus on one such heuristic cue --- repetition, which is known to increase belief through the illusory truth effect. We investigate repetition by extracting verbatim repetitive messaging (CopyPasta) from recent U.S. disinformation campaigns. After using an LLM to rewrite the CopyPasta messages, we show that AI-paraphrased messages (AIPasta) are lexically diverse in comparison to their CopyPasta counterparts while retaining the semantics of the original message. In a preregistered experiment comparing the persuasive effects of CopyPasta and AIPasta (N = 1,200, U.S. nationally representative sample), we find that AIPasta (versus control) increases perceptions of social consensus for false claims, particularly among participants less familiar with the false narrative. Among Republican participants, AIPasta also increases belief in false claims as compared to the control group. Additionally, AIPasta (versus control) increases sharing intention of the disinformation messages among participants, as well as the degree to which the broader false claims are recalled. Notably, we find that CopyPasta does not demonstrate the same level of persuasiveness across these dimensions. Broadly, our findings suggest that generative AI tools have the potential to amplify or increase the effectiveness of strategic information campaigns through strategies like non-verbatim repetition. Results have implications for the detection and mitigation of harmful and false information.
... The idea that simple language patterns can improve perceptions of scientists is supported by decades of processing fluency research and feelings-as-information theory (13)(14)(15)(16). This literature suggests people tend to use their feelings when consuming information (16,17), and people often prefer simplicity over complexity because simple (fluent) information feels better to most people than complex (disfluent) information. ...
This paper evaluated the effectiveness of using generative AI to simplify science communication and enhance the public’s understanding of science. By comparing lay summaries of journal articles from PNAS, yoked to those generated by AI, this work first assessed linguistic simplicity differences across such summaries and public perceptions in follow-up experiments. Specifically, Study 1a analyzed simplicity features of PNAS abstracts (scientific summaries) and significance statements (lay summaries), observing that lay summaries were indeed linguistically simpler, but effect size differences were small. Study 1b used a large language model, GPT-4, to create significance statements based on paper abstracts and this more than doubled the average effect size without fine-tuning. Study 2 experimentally demonstrated that simply-written GPT summaries facilitated more favorable perceptions of scientists (they were perceived as more credible and trustworthy, but less intelligent) than more complexly-written human PNAS summaries. Crucially, Study 3 experimentally demonstrated that participants comprehended scientific writing better after reading simple GPT summaries compared to complex PNAS summaries. In their own words, participants also summarized scientific papers in a more detailed and concrete manner after reading GPT summaries compared to PNAS summaries of the same article. AI has the potential to engage scientific communities and the public via a simple language heuristic, advocating for its integration into scientific dissemination for a more informed society.
... corrective information), insufficiently linking a correction to the misinformation in memory such that misinformation is retrieved unchecked despite the correction, and selectively retrieving misinformation in an automatic manner where the false tag attached to it by correction is not co-activated (for a review, see Ecker et al., 2022;Lewandowsky et al., 2012). Furthermore, insofar as misconceptions are formed in memory and that they are often inevitably repeated in a correction, misinformation becomes easier to process with greater familiarity, fluency, and accessibility, which may serve as cues that imply its truth and hedonic value and lead to more positive evaluations (Alter and Oppenheimer, 2009;Swire et al., 2017;Winkielman et al., 2003). Indeed, while corrections may suppress misinformation, they do not replace it (Gordon et al., 2017;Shtulman and Valcarcel, 2012); rather, they coexist and compete such that corrections have to override and inhibit misinformation for beliefs to be updated (Potvin et al., 2015;Trevors, 2019). ...
Misinformation can be broadly defined as false or inaccurate information created and spread with or without clear intent to cause harm. It travels fast and deep and persists despite debunking. It is well-documented that corrective messages and fact-checking efforts often fail to mitigate the effects or persistence of misinformation. In this article, we examine the persistence of misinformation as rooted in motivational and cognitive biases in information processing. While drawing on the frameworks of motivations that drive information seeking, sharing, and processing and various cognitive biases, we explicate mechanisms and processes that underlie the impact and persistence of misinformation. We conclude our article by discussing the potential utility of psychological inoculation as a prebunking strategy.
Purpose
Health short videos are serving as a powerful tool for encouraging individuals to actively adopt healthier behaviors. The sensory cues applied in these videos can be useful for engaging peripheral processing and enhancing attitudes. While previous research has examined the effects of various single cues, this study features a pioneering attempt to explore the roles of audiovisual cross-modal correspondence, encompassing multisensory cues perceived through different modalities, in health communication.
Design/methodology/approach
A 2 (color: warm/cool) × 2 (music tempo: fast/slow) between-subjects experiment was conducted to observe 120 participants’ responses to a health short video promoting eye health that was created using four different combinations of background color and background music tempo.
Findings
It was found that the congruent color–tempo pairings, that is blue & slow and orange & fast, led to more positive attitudes toward the videos than the incongruent pairings, that is blue & fast and orange & slow. The effect of cross-modal correspondence on attitude was fully mediated by processing fluency, with gender acting as a moderator between the two variables. Furthermore, individuals’ attitudes toward a short video positively influenced their health behavioral intentions.
Originality/value
These findings not only lend support to the theoretical framework of “multisensory cues-fluency-attitude-intention” chain for persuasion purposes but also have practical implications for creating effective health short videos.
This study investigates the effects of proenvironment photographs and graphs in environmental disclosures on potential investors' perceptions and willingness to invest, considering the moderating role of a company's environmental performance. An online experiment was conducted with experienced investors, where participants evaluated a hypothetical company with varying environmental performance outcomes (negative or positive) presented in different formats (text only, text with photographs, or text with graphs). The results indicate that proenvironment images enhance perceived environmental responsibility for companies with negative environmental performance, whereas processing fluency is improved when the image type aligns with environmental performance. Moreover, perceived environmental responsibility mediates the impact of images on the willingness to invest in negative performance contexts. In contrast, processing fluency mediates this effect for graphs in positive performance contexts. These findings offer guidance for company managers in effectively presenting environmental data and highlight the potential risks for policy‐makers regarding the misuse of images.
Purpose
The purpose of this research is to explore how text-emoji mismatch impacts consumers’ perceptions of authenticity and helpfulness in online reviews, examining the mediating effect of processing fluency and the moderating effects of response type and social distance.
Design/methodology/approach
Three between-subject experiments were conducted on Credamo and Wenjuanxing to test the hypotheses proposed in this research. The primary data analysis methods used were ANOVA and bootstrap analysis.
Findings
Study 1 found that consumers’ perceived helpfulness and authenticity of online reviews decline when the text and emojis do not match, with processing fluency mediating this effect. Study 2 revealed that humorous responses from firms to reviews with text-emoji mismatches enhance consumers’ perceived authenticity and helpfulness. Study 3 demonstrated that when potential consumers perceive a greater social distance from the reviewers, the negative impact of text-emoji mismatch is mitigated.
Originality/value
This study contributes to the fields of consumer reviews and emoji usage by examining how the relationship between emojis and text in online reviews (match vs. mismatch) affects consumers’ perceived authenticity and helpfulness. We also propose strategies for how firms can mitigate the negative impact of text-emoji mismatch.
Previous fluency research has demonstrated that when messages are heard in degraded audio quality, the speaker and the content they are communicating are judged more negatively than when heard in high quality. Using a virtual court paradigm, we investigated the efficacy of two different instructions to reduce the technology‐based bias—highlighting (1) the source responsible for audio quality (Experiment 1) and (2) variations in audio quality (Experiment 2). Results converged in showing that when instructions were provided prior to listening to recordings, people continued to evaluate speakers presented in low quality more negatively than those in high quality. However, results from Experiment 2 suggested that instructions provided after recordings may be effective and warrant further investigation. Given the digital divide and disproportionate impact of digital disruptions, these findings raise concerns about equity in high stakes environments such as remote justice.
Do people prefer that artificial intelligence (AI) aligns with gender stereotypes when requesting help to answer a question? We found that people preferred gender stereotypicality (over counterstereotypicality and androgyny) in voice-based AI when seeking help (e.g., preferring feminine voices to answer questions in feminine domains; Studies 1a–1b). Preferences for stereotypicality were stronger when using binary zero-sum (vs. continuous non-zero-sum) assessments (Study 2). Contrary to expectations, biases were larger when judging human (vs. AI) targets (Study 3). Finally, people were more likely to request (vs. decline) assistance from gender stereotypical (vs. counterstereotypical) human targets, but this choice bias did not extend to AI targets (Study 4). Across studies, we observed stronger preferences for gender stereotypicality in feminine (vs. masculine) domains, potentially due to examining biases in a stereotypically feminine context (helping). These studies offer nuanced insights into conditions under which people use gender stereotypes to evaluate human and non-human entities.
This study focuses on how fonts selected from different families have been used to test for disfluency. The motivation and standard for choosing a particular font for an experiment are not yet clearly defined from past studies. Drawing on methods in a systematic review of 10 articles published between 2007 and 2020, this article shows that authors prefer to use sans serif fonts in fluent conditions and serifs, scripts or handwritten fonts in disfluent conditions. In this study, disfluency manipulations were limited to reducing font sizes and percentages of grey or black. The largest size used was 56pt (fluent) and 18pt (disfluent) while the smallest was 12pt (fluent) and 10pt (disfluent). We observed that the opacity values of disfluent fonts ranged between 10% and 60%, making it unclear how disfluent a font can be. Apart from font sizes, fixation time, familiarity with materials and other controls influenced the results. This article reveals that a major gap still exists in research because of a lack of standard methods for determining the fonts used for testing subjects.
Purpose
Product color names related to a consumption setting are commonly used in advertising to persuade. This study aims to use consumption imagery fluency as an underlying mechanism for assessing how such a naming tactic impacts product evaluation.
Design/methodology/approach
Three between-subjects experiments examine how product evaluation, in response to the use of color names containing consumption situation information, varies as a function of their accessibility (Study 1), and also test the role of a naming explanation (Study 2). How readily a consumer takes in consumption imagery is evaluated as a mediator. The studies further check if color attribute serves as a moderator of such color naming effect and that the naming factor contributes to consumption imagery fluency directly or indirectly alters such through their impact on comprehension fluency (Study 3).
Findings
Marketing products with color names related to the consumption setting is more effective than using generic names. Consumption imagery fluency mediates the results. This positive outcome is reduced when color names are less accessible. Fortunately, including an explanation to facilitate reasoning for product color names is helpful to reverse this disadvantage. The same patterns are not evident for highly accessible names. In addition, the effectiveness of consumption situation-related color names is restricted to the circumstance of color attribute as secondary, as opposed to primary. Furthermore, naming factors influence the ease of consumption of imagery whether or not facilitated by comprehension fluency.
Research limitations/implications
This research provides evidence of consumers’ responses to product color naming that involves consumption situations and identifies consumption imagery fluency as a potential means for mediating the studied effect.
Practical implications
Naming a product color in consumption situation-related terms triggers consumption imagery, driving evaluation when color is the secondary attribute of a product.
Originality/value
This research contributes to understanding the influence of naming a product’s color in promotional communication and correlates to productive tactics for advertising messages.
Predictive processing is an influential theoretical framework for understanding human and animal cognition. In the context of predictive processing, learning is often reduced to optimizing the parameters of a generative model with a predefined structure. This is known as Bayesian parameter learning . However, to provide a comprehensive account of learning, one must also explain how the brain learns the structure of its generative model. This second kind of learning is known as structure learning . Structure learning would involve true structural changes in generative models. The purpose of the current paper is to describe the processes involved upstream of these structural changes. To do this, we first highlight the remarkable compatibility between predictive processing and the processing fluency theory . More precisely, we argue that predictive processing is able to account for all the main theoretical constructs associated with the notion of processing fluency (i.e., the fluency heuristic, naïve theory, the discrepancy‐attribution hypothesis, absolute fluency, expected fluency, and relative fluency). We then use this predictive processing account of processing fluency to show how the brain could infer whether it needs a structural change for learning the causal regularities at play in the environment. Finally, we speculate on how this inference might indirectly trigger structural changes when necessary.
Prior research found a word complexity effect: Authors who use complex words are less favorably received when writing academic essays, business letters, and other relatively formal communications. The present study tested if word choice affects evaluations of messages between friends (Experiments 1-2) and spoken messages (Experiment 2). Three widespread dimensions of social judgments were studied – namely, persuasiveness, competence, and sincerity. Participants read/heard messages that varied (between-participants) by ordinary versus low-frequency words ( sad vs. forlorn). Messages containing low-frequency words (mostly) received lower evaluations. Most importantly, word choice effects in messages between friends were consistently found – for both written and spoken language. Feedback analysis (Experiment 2) revealed that the overuse of “big vocabulary” conflicts with conscious social beliefs regarding ways to communicate, showing that social judgments spring from a combination of conscious social beliefs and the relatively unconscious influence of fluency.
People often rely on numeric metrics to make decisions and form judgments. Numbers can be difficult to process, leading to their underutilization, but they are also uniquely suited to making comparisons. Do people decide differently when some dimensions of a choice are quantified and others are not? We explore this question across 21 preregistered experiments (8 in the main text, N = 9,303; 13 in supplement, N = 13,936) involving managerial, policy, and consumer decisions. Participants face choices that involve tradeoffs (e.g., choosing between employees, one of whom has a higher likelihood of advancement but lower likelihood of retention), and we randomize which dimension of each tradeoff is presented numerically and which is presented qualitatively (using verbal estimates, discrete visualizations, or continuous visualizations). We show that people systematically shift their preferences toward options that dominate on tradeoff dimensions conveyed numerically—a pattern we dub “quantification fixation.” Further, we show that quantification fixation has financial consequences—it emerges in incentive-compatible hiring tasks and in charitable donation decisions. We identify one key mechanism that underlies quantification fixation and moderates its strength: When making comparative judgments, which are essential to tradeoff decisions, numeric information is more fluent than non-numeric information. Our findings suggest that when we count, we change what counts.
Purpose
Designers must recognise the significance of a brand logo’s visual elements as they convey various meanings. While studies have attempted to collate visual elements, efforts have often been limited to specific types of visual elements (e.g. typefaces) or restricted to certain product categories. This study aims to conceptualise a comprehensive list of visual elements used in brand logos and to validate it based on the top 500 global brand logos across eight product categories.
Design/methodology/approach
A comprehensive list was conceptualised through a combination of literature review, interviews with experts and observations of real brand logos. Using this exhaustive compilation, content analysis of the top 500 global brand logos was conducted to discern the prevalent trends of the visual elements in logos across various product categories.
Findings
The content analysis results highlighted an extensive preference for use of wordmark, no outline and horizontal proportion in brand logos. Overall, 42.6% and 31% of brands preferred using cool and neutral colours, respectively. Moreover, the preference for colour categories (warm/cool/neutral), font types (organic/geometric) and stacking of elements (horizontal/vertical/diagonal) varied across product categories.
Originality/value
This study contributes to the literature by creating a comprehensive guidebook of visual elements of logos. It also offers guidance to in-house and third-party designers of companies for logo design to better understand the nuances of intellectual property related to logo elements and assists managers in comparing their brands’ visual identity with those of their competitors.
Experimental methods from psycholinguistics allow experimental philosophers to study important automatic inferences, with a view to explaining and assessing philosophically relevant intuitions and arguments. Philosophical thought is shaped by verbal reasoning in natural language. Such reasoning is driven by automatic comprehension inferences. Such inferences shape, e.g., intuitions about verbally described cases, in philosophical thought experiments; more generally, they shape moves from premises to conclusions in philosophical arguments. These inferences can be examined with questionnaire-based and eye-tracking methods from psycholinguistics. We explain how these methods can be adapted for use in experimental philosophy. We demonstrate their application by presenting a new eye-tracking study that helps assess the influential philosophical ``argument from illusion.'' The study examines whether stereotypical inferences from polysemous words (viz., appearance verbs) are automatically triggered even when prefaced by contexts that defeat the inferences. We use this worked example to explain the key conceptual steps involved in designing behavioural experiments, step by step. Going beyond the worked example, we also explain methods that require no laboratory facilities.
Even when Ss fail to recall a solicited target, they can provide feeling-of-knowing (FOK) judgments about its availability in memory. Most previous studies addressed the question of FOK accuracy, only a few examined how FOK itself is determined, and none asked how the processes assumed to underlie FOK also account for its accuracy. The present work examined all 3 questions within a unified model, with the aim of demystifying the FOK phenomenon. The model postulates that the computation of FOK is parasitic on the processes involved in attempting to retrieve the target, relying on the accessibility of pertinent information. It specifies the links between memory strength, accessibility of correct and incorrect information about the target, FOK judgments, and recognition memory. Evidence from 3 experiments is presented. The results challenge the view that FOK is based on a direct, privileged access to an internal monitor.
This article reports 2 experiments that test whether both emotional and nonemotional feelings may be influenced by uninterpreted proprioceptive input. The logic of the procedure was adopted from studies by F. Strack, L. Martin, and S. Stepper (1988), who unobtrusively manipulated people's facial expressions. In the 1st experiment, a functionally equivalent technique was used to vary the posture of the body. Study 1 results revealed that success at an achievement task led to greater feelings of pride if the outcome was received in an upright position rather than in a slumped posture. Study 2 results revealed that nonemotional feelings of effort were influenced by contraction of the forehead muscle (corrugator), and Ss' self-ratings on a trait dimension reflected this experience when the facial contraction was maintained during the recall of behavioral episodes exemplifying this trait. To account for these results, a framework is proposed that draws on a distinction between noetic and experiential representations.
Two hypotheses concerning people's ability to predict later memory performance for unrecalled items were investigated. The target retrievability hypothesis states that feeling-of-knowing judgments (FKJs) are based on partial target information; and the cue familiarity hypothesis asserts that they are based on recognition of the cues. In Experiments 1 and 2, subjects either generated or read the targets of paired associates. Half of the cues had been primed in a pleasantness-rating task. The generation manipulation increased recall but had no effect on FKJs. Cue priming had no effect on recall but increased FKJs. In Experiment 3, using general information questions, primed after the initial recall attempt, both cue and target priming increased FKJs. Experiment 4, which remedied difficulties in Experiment 3, showed no effect of target priming whereas cue priming increased FKJs. The results favor the cue familiarity hypothesis.
A meta-analysis of research on Zajonc's (1968) mere exposure effect indicated that stimuli perceived without awareness produce substantially larger exposure effects than do stimuli that are consciously perceived (Bornstein, 1989a). However, this finding has not been tested directly in the laboratory. Two experiments were conducted comparing the magnitude of the exposure effect produced by 5-ms (i.e., subliminal) stimuli and stimuli presented for longer durations (i.e., 500 ms). In both experiments, 5-ms stimuli produced significantly larger mere exposure effects than did 500-ms stimuli. These results were obtained for polygon (Experiment 1), Welsh figure (Experiment 2), and photograph stimuli (Experiments 1 and 2). Implications of these findings for theoretical models of the mere exposure effect are discussed.
Experienced ease of recall was found to qualify the implications of recalled content. Ss who had to recall 12 examples of assertive (unassertive) behaviors, which was difficult, rated themselves as less assertive (less unassertive) than subjects who had to recall 6 examples, which was easy. In fact, Ss reported higher assertiveness after recalling 12 unassertive rather than 12 assertive behaviors. Thus, self-assessments only reflected the implications of recalled content if recall was easy. The impact of ease of recall was eliminated when its informational value was discredited by a misattribution manipulation. The informative functions of subjective experiences are discussed.
Presents a spreading-activation theory of human semantic processing, which can be applied to a wide range of recent experimental results. The theory is based on M. R. Quillian's (1967) theory of semantic memory search and semantic preparation, or priming. In conjunction with this, several misconceptions concerning Quillian's theory are discussed. A number of additional assumptions are proposed for his theory to apply it to recent experiments. The present paper shows how the extended theory can account for results of several production experiments by E. F. Loftus, J. F. Juola and R. C. Atkinson's (1971) multiple-category experiment, C. Conrad's (1972) sentence-verification experiments, and several categorization experiments on the effect of semantic relatedness and typicality by K. J. Holyoak and A. L. Glass (1975), L. J. Rips et al (1973), and E. Rosch (1973). The paper also provides a critique of the Rips et al model for categorization judgments. (44 ref)
Several independent lines of research bear on the question of why individuals avoid decisions by postponing them, failing to act, or accepting the status quo. This review relates findings across several different disciplines and uncovers 4 decision avoidance effects that offer insight into this common but troubling behavior: choice deferral, status quo bias, omission bias, and inaction inertia. These findings are related by common antecedents and consequences in a rational-emotional model of the factors that predispose humans to do nothing. Prominent components of the model include cost-benefit calculations, anticipated regret, and selection difficulty. Other factors affecting decision avoidance through these key components, such as anticipatory negative emotions, decision strategies, counterfactual thinking, and preference uncertainty, are also discussed.
The authors used paired-associate learning to investigate the hypothesis that the speed of generating an interactive image (encoding fluency) influenced 2 metacognitive judgments: judgments of learning (JOLs) and quality of encoding ratings (QUEs), Results from Experiments 1 and 2 indicated that latency of a keypress indicating successful image formation was negatively related to both JOLs and QUEs even though latency was unrelated to recall. Experiment 3 demonstrated that when concrete and abstract items were mixed in a single list, latency was related to concreteness, judgments, and recall, However, item concreteness and fluency influenced judgments independently of one another. These outcomes suggest an important role of encoding fluency in the formation of metacognitive judgments about learning and future recall.
The affect system, in its position to monitor organismic-environmental transactions, may be sensitive to the internal dynamics of information processing. Hence, the authors predicted that facilitation of stimulus processing should elicit a brief, mild, positive affective response. In 2 studies, participants watched a series of neutral pictures while the processing ease was unobtrusively manipulated. Affective reactions were assessed with facial electromyography (EMG). In both studies, easy-to-process pictures elicited higher activity over the region of zygomaticus major, indicating positive affect. The EMG data were paralleled by self-reports of positive responses to the facilitated stimuli. The findings suggest a close link between processing dynamics and affect and may help understand several preference phenomena, including the mere-exposure effect. The findings also highlight a potential source of affective biases in social judgments.
Review of research into the consequences of easy vs difficult processing; traces fluency effects to the hedonic quality of the processing experience.
Reports 2 experiments that test whether both emotional and nonemotional feelings may be influenced by uninterpreted proprioceptive input. The logic of the procedure was adopted from studies by F. Strack et al (1988), who unobtrusively manipulated people's facial expressions. In the 1st experiment, a functionally equivalent technique was used to vary the posture of the body. Study 1 results revealed that success at an achievement task led to greater feelings of pride if the outcome was received in an upright position rather than in a slumped posture. Study 2 results revealed that nonemotional feelings of effort were influenced by contraction of the forehead muscle (corrugator), and Ss' self-ratings on a trait dimension reflected this experience when the facial contraction was maintained during the recall of behavioral episodes exemplifying this trait. To account for these results, a framework is proposed that draws on a distinction between noetic and experiential representations. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
This research examines the impact of media depictions of success (or failure) on consumers' desire for luxury brands. In a pilot study and three additional studies, we demonstrate that read- ing a story about a similar/successful other, such as a business major from the same university, increases consumers' expectations about their own future wealth, which in turn increases their desire for luxury brands. However, reading about a dissimilar successful other, such as a biol- ogy major, lowers consumers' preferences for luxury brands. Furthermore, we examine the role of ease of imagining oneself in the narrative as a mediator of the relation between direction of comparison, similarity, and brand preference.
Perception informs people about the opportunities for action and their associated costs. To this end, explicit awareness of spatial layout varies not only with relevant optical and ocular-motor variables, but also as a function of the costs associated with performing intended actions. Although explicit awareness is mutable in this respect, visually guided actions directed at the immediate environment are not. When the metabolic costs associated with walking an extent increase-perhaps because one is wearing a heavy backpack-hills appear steeper and distances to targets appear greater. When one is standing on a high balcony, the apparent distance to the ground is correlated with one's fear of falling. Perceiving spatial layout combines the geometry of the world with behavioral goals and the costs associated with achieving these goals.
© 2006 Association for Psychological Science.
Two studies are reported that investigate whether facial expressions may influence judgments of fame. In the current research, the authors tested the hypothesis of whether feelings of mental effort influence judgments of fame. To test this hypothesis, participants were required to contract the corrugator muscle while judging the fame of persons depicted in a photo. In Experiment 1, participants who succeeded in maintaining the contraction during the entire task evaluated the targets to be less famous than did judges who did not succeed or were not required to engage in any facial contraction. In the second experiment, participants’ success at their muscle contraction was monitored by electromyograph (EMG) feedback and a control group had to activate a different (frontalis) facial muscle. The fame effect was replicated under those conditions. The present findings suggest that facial expressions may modify nonemotional feelings and the judgments that are based on them.
Presents a summary and synthesis of the author's work on attribution theory concerning the mechanisms involved in the process of causal explanations. The attribution theory is related to studies of social perception, self-perception, and psychological epistemology. Two systematic statements of attribution theory are described, discussed, and illustrated with empirical data: the covariation and the configuration concepts. Some problems for attribution theory are considered, including the interplay between preconceptions and new information, simple vs. complex schemata, attribution of covariation among causes, and illusions in attributions. The role of attribution in decision making and behavior is discussed. (56 ref.) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
The familiarity of names produced by their prior presentation can be misinterpreted as fame. We used this false fame effect to separately study the effects of divided attention on familiarity versus conscious recollection. In a first experiment, famous and nonfamous names were presented to be read under conditions of full vs. divided attention. Divided attention greatly reduced later recognition memory performance but had no effect on gains in familiarity as measured by fame judgments. In later experiments, we placed recognition memory and familiarity in opposition by presenting only nonfamous names to be read in the first phase. Recognizing a name as earlier read on the later fame test allowed Ss to be certain that it was nonfamous. Divided attention at study or during the fame test reduced list recognition performance but had no effect on familiarity. We conclude that conscious recollection is an attention-demanding act that is separate from assessing familiarity. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
People of all ages are more likely to choose to restudy items (or allocate more study time to items) that are perceived as more difficult to learn than as less difficult to learn. Existing models of self-regulated study adequately account for this inverse relation between perceived difficulty of learning and these 2 measures of self-regulated study (item selection and self-paced study). However, these models cannot account for positive relations between perceived difficulty of learning and item selection, which are demonstrated in the present investigation. Namely, in Experiments 1 and 2, the authors described conditions in which people more often selected to study items judged as less difficult than as more difficult to learn. This positive relation was not demonstrated for self-paced study, which was always negatively correlated with judged difficulty to learn. In Experiments 3 through 6, the authors explored explanations for this dissociation between item selection and self-paced study. Discussion focuses on a general model of self-regulated study that includes planning, discrepancy reduction, and working-memory constraints. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Studies suggest that young children are quite limited in their knowledge about cognitive phenomena—or in their metacognition—and do relatively little monitoring of their own memory, comprehension, and other cognitive enterprises. Metacognitive knowledge is one's stored knowledge or beliefs about oneself and others as cognitive agents, about tasks, about actions or strategies, and about how all these interact to affect the outcomes of any sort of intellectual enterprise. Metacognitive experiences are conscious cognitive or affective experiences that occur during the enterprise and concern any aspect of it—often, how well it is going. Research is needed to describe and explain spontaneous developmental acquisitions in this area and find effective ways of teaching metacognitive knowledge and cognitive monitoring skills. (9 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Confidence in personality impressions is proposed to stem from the richness of people's mental representations of others. Representational richness produces confidence because it enhances the fluency with which people can make judgments, and it increases confidence even when it does not result in more accurate impressions. Results of 3 experiments support these propositions. A 4th experiment suggests that representational richness is increased by both pseudorelevant and relevant information, but not by irrelevant information. A 5th experiment suggests that representational richness has effects on confidence above and beyond the effects of metainformation (i.e., extracontent aspects of information). The implications of these findings for evaluating evidence of error in person perception and for reducing stereotyping and prejudice are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Argues that people use systematic rules for assessing cause, both in science and everyday inference. By explicating the processes that underlie the judgment of causation, the authors review and integrate various theories of causality proposed by psychologists, philosophers, statisticians, and others. Because causal judgment involves inference and uncertainty, the literature on judgment under uncertainty is also considered. It is suggested that the idea of a "causal field" is central for determining causal relevance, differentiating causes from conditions, determining the salience of alternative explanations, and affecting molar versus molecular explanations. Various "cues-to-causality" such as covariation, temporal order, contiguity in time and space, and similarity of cause and effect are discussed, and it is shown how these cues can conflict with probabilistic ideas. A model for combining the cues and the causal field is outlined that explicates methodological issues such as spurious correlation, "causalation," and causal inference in case studies. The discounting of an explanation by specific alternatives is discussed as a special case of the sequential updating of beliefs. Conjunctive explanations in multiple causation are also considered. (120 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
A review and meta-analysis of methodological and subject variables influencing the exposure–affect relationship was performed on studies of the mere exposure effect published in the 20 years following R. B. Zajonc's (see record
1968-12019-001) seminal monograph. Stimulus type, stimulus complexity, presentation sequence, exposure duration, stimulus recognition, age of subject, delay between exposure and ratings, and maximum number of stimulus presentations all influence the magnitude of the exposure effect. Implications of these findings are discussed in the context of previous reviews of the literature on exposure effects and with respect to prevailing theoretical models of the exposure–affect relationship. Modifications of the 2-factor model of exposure effects that increase the heuristic value of the model are described. A possible evolutionary basis of the exposure effect is discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Investigates the Story Model, N. Pennington and R. Hastie's (1986, 1988) explanation-based theory of decision making for juror decisions. In Exp 1, varying the ease with which stories could be constructed affected verdict judgments and the impact of credibility evidence. Memory for evidence in all conditions was equivalent, implying that the story structure was a mediator of decisions and of the impact of credibility evidence. In Exps 2 and 3, Ss evaluated the evidence in 3 ways. When Ss made a global judgment at the end of the case, their judgment processes followed the prescriptions of the Story Model, not of Bayesian or linear updating models. When Ss made item-by-item judgments after each evidence block, linear anchor and adjust models described their judgments. In conditions in which story construction strategies were more likely to be used, story completeness had greater effects on decisions. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Feelings of familiarity are not direct products of memory. Although prior experience of a stimulus can produce a feeling of familiarity, that feeling can also be aroused in the absence of prior experience if perceptual processing of the stimulus is fluent (e.g., B. W. Whittlesea et al, 1990). This suggests that feelings of familiarity arise through an unconscious inference about the source of processing fluency. The present experiments extend that conclusion. First, they show that a wide variety of feelings about the past are controlled by a fluency heuristic, including feelings about the meaning, pleasantness, duration, and recency of past events. Second, they demonstrate that the attribution process does not rely only on perceptual fluency, but can be influenced even more by the fluency of conceptual processing. Third, they show that although the fluency heuristic itself is simple, people's use of it is highly sophisticated and makes them robustly sensitive to the actual historical status of current events. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Reports 4 experiments concerning the effect of repetition on rated truth (the illusory-truth effect). Statements were paired with differentially credible sources (true vs false). Old trues would be rated true on 2 bases, source recollection and statement familiarity. Old falses, however, would be rated false if sources were recollected, leaving the unintentional influence of familiarity as their only basis for being rated true. Even so, falses were rated truer than new statements unless sources were especially memorable. Estimates showed the contributions of the 2 influences to be independent; the intentional influence of recollection was reduced if control was impaired, but the unintentional influence of familiarity remained constant. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Three experiments investigated the effects of syntactic complexity on the persuasiveness of advertising. Experiment 1 showed that, in a broadcast advertising context, syntactic complexity affects recall and recognition but not the persuasiveness of the advertising. However, Experiment 2 indicated that, in a print context, persuasiveness of an advertisement is affected by syntactic complexity. Finally, Experiment 3 demonstrated that motivation to process information interacts with syntactic complexity to determine the persuasiveness of print advertising. These results imply that the impact of syntactic complexity on advertising effectiveness is more complicated than previously thought.
Consumers' judgments concerning the magnitude of numerical differences are influenced by the ease of mental computations. Results from a set of experiments show that ease of computation can affect judgments of the magnitude of price differences, discount magnitudes, and brand choices. Participants seem to believe that it is easier to judge the size of a larger difference than that of a smaller difference. In the absence of appropriate corrective steps, this naive belief can lead to systematic biases in judgments. For example, when presented with two pairs of numbers, participants incorrectly judged the magnitude of the difference to be smaller for pairs with difficult computations (e.g., 4.97 - 3.96; arithmetic difference 1.01) than for pairs with easy computations (e.g., 5.00 - 4.00; arithmetic difference 1.00). The effect does not manifest when judgments do not entail mental computations or when participants are made aware that the ease or difficulty is caused by computational complexity. Further, this effect was mitigated when we manipulated participants' prior experience in a learning phase of the experiment. The results have implications for buyers and sellers, and for the understanding of the role of meta-cognitive experiences in numerical judgments.
HYPOTHESIZES THAT MERE REPEATED EXPOSURE OF THE INDIVIDUAL TO A STIMULUS OBJECT ENHANCES HIS ATTITUDE TOWARD IT. BY "MERE" EXPOSURE IS MEANT A CONDITION MAKING THE STIMULUS ACCESSIBLE TO PERCEPTION. SUPPORT FOR THE HYPOTHESIS CONSISTS OF 4 TYPES OF EVIDENCE, PRESENTED AND REVIEWED: (1) THE CORRELATION BETWEEN AFFECTIVE CONNOTATION OF WORDS AND WORD FREQUENCY, (2) THE EFFECT OF EXPERIMENTALLY MANIPULATED FREQUENCY OF EXPOSURE UPON THE AFFECTIVE CONNOTATION OF NONSENSE WORDS AND SYMBOLS, (3) THE CORRELATION BETWEEN WORD FREQUENCY AND THE ATTITUDE TO THEIR REFERENTS, AND (4) THE EFFECTS OF EXPERIMENTALLY MANIPULATED FREQUENCY OF EXPOSURE ON ATTITUDE. THE RELEVANCE FOR THE EXPOSURE-ATTITUDE HYPOTHESIS OF THE EXPLORATION THEORY AND OF THE SEMANTIC SATIATION FINDINGS WERE EXAMINED. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2006 APA, all rights reserved).
Confidence in personality impressions is proposed to stem from the richness of people's mental representations of others. Representational richness produces confidence because it enhances the fluency with which people can make judgments, and it increases confidence even when it does not result in more accurate impressions. Results of 3 experiments support these propositions. A 4th experiment suggests that representational richness is increased by both pseudorelevant and relevant information, but not by irrelevant information. A 5th experiment suggests that representational richness has effects on confidence above and beyond the effects of metainformation (i.e., extracontent aspects of information ). The implications of these findings for evaluating evidence of error in person perception and for reducing stereotyping and prejudice are discussed.
From childhood, each of us develops our own personal set of theories and beliefs about the world in which we live. Given the impossibility of knowing about every event that can ever take place, we use cognitive short cuts to try to predict and make sense of the world around us. One of the fundamental pieces of information we use to predict future events, and make sense of past events, is ‘frequency’ — how often has such an event happened to us, or how often have we observed a particular event? With such information we will make inferences about the likelihood of its future appearance. We will make judgements, assess risk, or even consumer decisions, on the basis of this information. We also form associations between events that frequently occur together, and even (often incorrectly) attribute causality between one event and the other as a result of their simultaneous appearance. How is it though that we process such information? How does our brain deal with information on frequencies? How does such information influence our behaviour, beliefs, and judgements? This book brings together research on this subject from both cognitive psychology and social psychology.
We propose that confidence in potential answers to general knowledge questions is based, in part, on the ease with which those answers come to mind. Consistent with this hypothesis, prior exposure to correct and to related but incorrect answers to general knowledge questions increased the speed, frequency, and confidence with which subjects gave those answers on a subsequent test of general knowledge. Similar effects were obtained even when subjects were warned that the list included incorrect answers (Experiment 2). The results of Experiment 3 indicated that the effects do not rely on deliberate search of memory for the list: Subjects who read a list with correct answers to half of the questions on a subsequent test gained full benefit of exposure to correct answers relative to subjects who read a list with correct answers to all of the questions, yet showed no cost on questions for which answers were not in the list relative to subjects who read a list of unrelated fillers. Finally, Experiments 4a and 4b demonstrated that prior exposure to incorrect answers can give rise to illusions of knowing even when subjects know that all of the answers on the study list were incorrect. In those studies, subjects were correctly informed that all of the answers on the list were incorrect, yet those who had studied the list with divided attention nonetheless tended to give the studied incorrect answers as responses to the knowledge questions. We discuss these findings in terms of Jacoby, Kelley. and Dywans (1989) attributional approach to subjective experience.
In spontaneous speaking, the is normally pronounced as thuh, with the reduced vowel schwa (rhyming with the first syllable of about). But it is sometimes pronounced as thiy, with a nonreduced vowel (rhyming with see). In a large corpus of spontaneous English conversation, speakers were found to use thiy to signal an immediate suspension of speech to deal with a problem in production. Fully 81% of the instances of thiy in the corpus were followed by a suspension of speech, whereas only 7% of a matched sample of thuhs were followed by such suspensions. The problems people dealt with after thiy were at many levels of production, including articulation, word retrieval, and choice of message, but most were in the following nominal. © 1997 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.
Exposure increases positive affective responses to stimuli (the mere exposure effect). In nonsocial stimuli, this increased positive affect can generalize to a prototype or average of those stimuli. We investigated whether increased positive affect for previously seen faces generalizes to averaged composites of those faces. In two experiments, exposure to individual faces increased liking ratings of averaged composites (not seen previously) of those faces, in addition to the faces themselves. Attractiveness ratings of averaged composites also increased after exposure to component faces in Experiment 1 but not in Experiment 2. These results raised the possibility that a generalized mere exposure affect contributes to the appeal of average faces, although the evidence was stronger for generalization of liking than attractiveness.
In 3 experiments, this article compares how overhearers interpreted second speakers’ contributions to a conversation depending on whether the second speaker responded to a first speaker immediately; paused and responded; said um and responded; or said um, paused, and then responded. The conversational snippets tested were unscripted and diverse; an example of one exchange is, “Are you here because of affirmative action?” (pause, um, or both) “It helped me out a little bit. ” Overhearers thought speakers had more production difficulty, were less honest, and were less comfortable with topics underdiscussionwhenspeakerseithersaidumorpaused,andevenmoresowithboth.The best explanation for the data is that overhearers are judging, for each question asked, what it means for speakers to produce an anticipated or an unanticipated delay. Pauses, ums, and uhs are popularly understood as meaningless or as hindrances to good communication. One common conception of pauses, ums, and uhs is that they are all versions of the same thing. The traditional label for ums and uhsinthe research literature, filled pauses, emphasizes this seeming interchangeability. In this view, whether a person uses an um or an uh or a pause would be a matter of personal style or habit, like speaking quickly or speaking softly. However, researchers
A review and meta-analysis of methodological and subject variables influencing the exposure-affect relationship was performed on studies of the mere exposure effect published in the 20 years following Zajonc's (1968) seminal monograph. Stimulus type, stimulus complexity, presentation sequence, exposure duration, stimulus recognition, age of subject, delay between exposure and ratings, and maximum number of stimulus presentations all influence the magnitude of the exposure effect. Implications of these findings are discussed in the context of previous reviews of the literature on exposure effects and with respect to prevailing theoretical models of the exposure-affect relationship. Modifications of the 2-factor model of exposure effects that increase the heuristic value of the model are described. A possible evolutionary basis of the exposure effect is discussed.
The authors propose that consumer choices are often systematically influenced by preference fluency (i.e., the subjective feeling that forming a preference for a specific option is easy or difficult). Four studies manipulate the fluency of preference formation by presenting descriptions in an easy- or difficult-to- read font (Study 1) or by asking participants to think of few versus many reasons for their choice (Studies 2-4). As the authors predict, subjective experiences of difficulty increase choice deferral (Studies 1 and 2) and the selection of a compromise option (Studies 3 and 4), unless consumers are induced to attribute the experience to an unrelated cause. Unlike studies of decision conflict, these effects are obtained without changing the attributes of the alternatives, the composition of the choice sets, or the reference points. The authors discuss the,theoretical and practical implications of the results.
According to a two-step account of the mere-exposure effect, repeated exposure leads to the subjective feeling of perceptual fluency, which in turn influences liking. If so, perceptual fluency manipulated by means other than repetition should influence liking. In three experiments, effects of perceptual fluency on affective judgments were examined. In Experiment 1, higher perceptual fluency was achieved by presenting a matching rather than nonmatching prime before showing a target picture. Participants judged targets as prettier if preceded by a matching rather than nonmatching prime. In Experi- ment 2, perceptual fluency was manipulated by figure-ground contrast. Stimuli were judged as more pretty, and less ugly, the higher the con- trast. In Experiment 3, perceptual fluency was manipulated by presen- tation duration. Stimuli shown for a longer duration were liked more, and disliked less. We conclude (a) that perceptual fluency increases liking and (b) that the experience of fluency is affectively positive, and hence attributed to positive but not to negative features, as reflected in a differential impact on positive and negative judgments. 0
The mental processes by which people construct scenarios, or examples, resemble the running of the simulation model. Mental simulation appears to be used to make predictions, assess probabilities and evaluate casual statements. A particular form of simulation, which concerns the mental undoing of certain events, plays an important role in the analysis of regret and close calls. Two rules of mental undoing are proposed. According to the downhill rule, people undo events by removing surprising or unexpected occurrences. According to the focus rule, people manipulate the entities on which they focus. The implications of the rules of undoing and mental simulation to the evaluation of scenarios are discussed. (Author)
Human reasoning is accompanied by metacognitive experiences, most notably the ease or difficulty of recall and thought generation and the fluency with which new information can be processed. These experiences are informative in their own right. They can serve as a basis of judgment in addition to, or at the expense of, declarative information and can qualify the conclusions drawn from recalled content. What exactly people conclude from a given metacognitive experience depends on the naive theory of mental processes they bring to bear, rendering the outcomes highly variable. The obtained judgments cannot be predicted on the basis of accessible declarative information alone; we cannot understand human judgment without taking into account the interplay of declarative and experiential information.
The perceptual fluency/attributional model of the mere-exposure effect proposed by R. F. Bornstein and P. D'Agostino (1992) predicts that when recognition of a previously presented stimulus is above chance, feelings of fluency associated with that stimulus are discounted and thus the amount of fluency (mis)attributed to liking is reduced. This correction process results in smaller mere-exposure effects for supraliminal stimuli than for ''subliminal'' stimuli because when recognition is below chance participants are unaware of the source of fluency and they do not engage in correction. We tested this prediction in three experiments by presenting photographs of faces (Experiments 1 and 2) and polygons (Experiment 3) at varying exposure frequencies for 40 ms and 400 ms durations. Contrary to the prediction of the model, a significant mere-exposure effect was only found when recognition performance was at its highest level. Furthermore, across the three experiments liking and recognition were positively correlated. According to the perceptual fluency/attributional model of the mere-exposure effect, the unreinforced repeated presentation of a neutral stimulus enhances the subjective feeling of perceptual fluency associated with that stimulus when it is reencountered. This feeling of fluency is then (mis)attributed to liking resulting in an increase in positive affect towards that stimulus */a ''mere-exposure'' effect (Bornstein, Cavenett for their help in recruiting and running participants, and Darrell Collins for assistance with programming the experiments.
Most texts on writing style encourage authors to avoid overly-complex words. However, a majority of undergraduates admit to deliberately increasing the complexity of their vocabulary so as to give the impression of intelligence. This paper explores the extent to which this strategy is effective. Experiments 1–3 manipulate complexity of texts and find a negative relationship between complexity and judged intelligence. This relationship held regardless of the quality of the original essay, and irrespective of the participants' prior expectations of essay quality. The negative impact of complexity was mediated by processing fluency. Experiment 4 directly manipulated fluency and found that texts in hard to read fonts are judged to come from less intelligent authors. Experiment 5 investigated discounting of fluency. When obvious causes for low fluency exist that are not relevant to the judgement at hand, people reduce their reliance on fluency as a cue; in fact, in an effort not to be influenced by the irrelevant source of fluency, they over-compensate and are biased in the opposite direction. Implications and applications are discussed. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Subjects heard four piano compositions that were constructed to represent differing degrees of complexity, as defined by their
chordal and rhythmic properties and corroborated by subjects’ complexity ratings. In line with the predictions of an optimal
complexity model of musical preference, judged liking for the compositions was a unimodal function of their complexity. After
each composition was rated for liking, one of the four compositions was presented and rated an additional 16 times. Also congruent
with an optimal complexity model was the finding that the affective consequences of repeated exposure varied depending upon
whether the repeatedly exposed composition was more or less complex than the subject’s preferred complexity level. The latter
finding suggests that repeated exposure effects are a function of both situational and individual factors.
The results of two experiments indicate that individual differences in syntactic processing are governed in part by the amount of working memory capacity available for language comprehension processes. Reading the verbs of an object relative sentence, such as The reporter that the senator attacked admitted the error, takes more time for readers with less working memory capacity for language, and their resulting comprehension is less accurate. Experiment 1 investigated the effects of a concurrent working memory load and found that with no load or a small memory load many Low Span readers comprehended object relative sentences very poorly although their reading times in the critical area of these sentences were greater than those of High Span subjects. Experiment 2 replicated the reading time effects of Experiment 1 for object relative sentences and showed that pragmatic information improved the comprehension of the lower capacity readers, although their use of this information was limited to the clause in which it was presented.