Marketing materials often create difficulties for consumers through elements like unconventional fonts or distracting background images, leading to perceptual disfluency—a sense of difficulty encoding information. During choices, consumers can mistake perceptual disfluency for choice difficulty, a feeling of indecision. Building on this idea, eleven preregistered experiments (N = 9,042) show that, when making choices, perceptual disfluency can lead consumers to rely on information that feels more intuitively appealing to them, such as a familiar brand, a preferred country of origin, or a recommendation, rather than on information they must carefully consider like numerical product specifications. Differing from the effect of perceptual disfluency in other situations, during choices, this effect occurs because consumers process information less deeply, engaging in relatively more intuitive and less analytical processing. This effect is amplified when consumers endorse a “fast-is-accurate” lay theory. In contrast, it does not occur when consumers do not mistake perceptual disfluency for choice difficulty, as when prompted to consider the actual reason for the disfluency, or when not making a choice.

People often rationalize their choices, reassessing selected options as more positive after choosing them. This paper proposes that this type of rationalization does not arise from the act or self-perception of choosing (as previously thought), but rather from accepting the outcome, characterized by the degree to which it feels resolved and settled. It builds on a dissonance-reduction account of rationalization, in which unfavorable features of a chosen alternative become inconsistent with the choice, and the resulting cognitive dissonance motivates the chooser to rationalize them (e.g., by downplaying the importance of those features) and form a more favorable view of the chosen alternative. We extend this idea by suggesting that a similar process can motivate this form of rationalization for outcomes that were not personally selected, provided there is acceptance of the outcome. This paper introduces acceptance as a critical moderator of this type of rationalization for both choices and assignments, with higher acceptance leading to more rationalization. This conceptualization allows for the exploration of factors that influence acceptance of outcomes. Potential antecedents such as freedom to choose or reject the outcome, finality of the outcome, and consent to the outcome-determining process are discussed. Finally, this perspective broadens the scope of dissonance theory. While choice has been considered a necessary condition for dissonance effects, the results from seven experiments (N = 2,557) challenge this view, bridging dissonance and other theories of rationalization.

  Harvard Business Review

  2021 Bocconi Junior Research Grant

Recently, gender-ambiguous (non-binary) voices have been added to voice assistants to combat gender stereotypes and foster inclusion. However, if people react negatively to such voices, these laudable efforts may be counterproductive. In five preregistered studies (N = 3,684) we find that people do react negatively, rating products described by narrators with gender-ambiguous voices less favorably than when they are described by clearly male or female narrators. The voices create a feeling of unease, what we call social disfluency, that affects evaluations of the products being described. These effects are best explained by low familiarity with voices that sound ambiguous. Thus, initial negative reactions can be overcome with more exposure.

  Il Sole 24 Ore

Intentions are one of the most widely used constructs in consumer research. We review over 50 years of research that has helped us understand what intentions are, their antecedents and consequences, and how best to measure and use them as a proxy for or predictor of behavior. We define intentions and differentiate them from other closely relatedly psychological constructs. We review several psychological theories where intentions play a central role and highlight what is known about the strength of the intentions-behavior relationship, and factors that moderate the strength of that relationship. We also review more methodological research and discuss what is known about how to best measure intentions and use them to predict behavior. Finally, we suggest opportunities for continued research on intentions and discuss their continued relevance in a world of big data.

In a randomized field experiment with the education charitable giving platform DonorsChoose.org (N = 30,297), we examined email personalization using a potential donor’s name. We measured the effectiveness of matching potential donors to specific teachers in need based on surname, surname initial letters, gender, ethnicity, and surname country of origin. Full surname matching was most effective, with potential donors being more likely to open an email, click on a link in the email, and donate to a teacher who shared their own surname. They also donated more money overall. Our results suggest that uniting people with shared names is an effective individual-level approach to email personalization. Potential donors who shared a surname first-letter but not an entire name with teachers also behaved more generously. We discuss how using a person’s name in marketing communications may capture attention and bridge social distance.

  2026 Bocconi Junior Reserach Grant

The endowment effect is the tendency for an owner (potential seller) to value a good more than a nonowner (potential buyer). It influences consumer behavior, pricing, and decision-making in markets and everyday life. Scholars have proposed many explanations for the effect, including loss aversion, cognitive processing differences between owners and nonowners, incorporating owned objects into the sense of self, and market dynamics. Here, a new explanation is advanced that conceptualizes the endowment effect as a form of rationalization similar to how people rationalize the choices they make. After choosing, people feel dissonance about their selection’s downsides. So, they downplay those flaws and see the outcome more positively. Recent research suggests that this process does not actually require a person to actively choose, but merely to accept the outcome. The current research explores the possibility that this process of rationalization rooted in dissonance reduction could also contribute to the endowment effect. Specifically, owners rationalize their possessions, enhancing their perceived value, a process that does not occur among nonowners. The article reviews the literature from this perspective and experimentally tests derived predictions.

Consumers increasingly express choices in digital environments by speaking rather than clicking, yet little is known about how this shift in choice expression modality shapes default acceptance. Across six preregistered experiments (N = 2, 934), we show that consumers are more likely to accept default options when expressing their choice by speaking rather than by clicking. This effect emerges in both incentive-compatible and hypothetical choice settings, and generalizes across narrated and written product descriptions, horizontally and vertically presented options, and option sets of different sizes. This effect arises because speaking heightens perceived time pressure by making the choice feel more immediate, thereby increasing reliance on the default. Supporting this explanation, perceived time pressure mediates the effect, and the effect attenuates when interfaces reduce expectations of an immediate response, such as by imposing a brief delay before responding or requiring self-initiated microphone activation. By identifying choice expression modality as a systematic and previously overlooked determinant of default acceptance, this research adds to both theories of people’s use of different modalities in communication, and their attitudes towards default options. Furthermore, it offers practical implications for companies optimizing the design of user interfaces.

Brands are among a firm’s most valuable marketing assets, making brand name selection a critical strategic decision. A common naming strategy is abbreviation (e.g., “KFC” for “Kentucky Fried Chicken” or “NASA” for “National Aeronautics and Space Administration”). Despite their prevalence, the consequences of abbreviated brand names for consumer evaluations and support are not well understood. Managers often assume that abbreviations enhance brand appeal. However, results from six studies—including an archival analysis of nearly 700 top U.S. brands, a Facebook field study, and four experiments involving both real and fictional brands—reveal that abbreviating brand names can reduce consumer support. This occurs because abbreviation can disrupt a brand name’s morphology, making it harder to process and less fluent. However, this negative effect can be mitigated when an abbreviation is paired with conceptually and phonologically fluent cues that aid processing. Moreover, abbreviation can be beneficial in stigmatized product categories, where it obscures negative associations. This research advances psycholinguistic theory in marketing and contributes to the emerging field of brand linguistics by demonstrating the critical role of morphological structure in brand naming.

As podcasts and text-to-speech technologies proliferate, consumers increasingly encounter news in spoken rather than written form. Yet little is known about how this shift in consumption modality affects perceived news credibility. Six preregistered experiments (N = 3,679) using published news articles and accompanying audio from major media outlets show that spoken news is perceived as more credible than written news—the hearing-is-believing effect. This effect emerges both when modality is randomly assigned and when consumers choose, and it generalizes to news originally created for reading or for listening. The hearing-is-believing effect is driven by listening fluency, the subjective ease of processing spoken content relative to written text. Consumers misinterpret this ease of processing as a cue to credibility. Listening fluency can be reduced by background noise or by content formats that disrupt information processing. Beyond credibility judgments, listening to news increases trust in the news source and heightens consumers’ stated intentions to act on the news. These findings contribute to research on modality and fluency and highlight the psychological and policy implications of the shift toward spoken news being facilitated by voice technologies.

  2023 Bocconi Junior Research Grant

As voice-based interfaces increasingly mediate daily decisions, understanding how communication modality shapes judgment becomes critical. Prior research suggests speech can enhance persuasion and person-perception, or it can lead listeners to focus on negative information. We propose that speech does not inherently produce more positive or negative evaluations. Instead, drawing on evaluability theory, we argue that the ephemerality of spoken information impairs the effective use of low-evaluability attributes (features that derive meaning primarily through comparison), which can result in less-extreme attitudes. Across five preregistered experiments (N = 5,518 adults), we demonstrate that speech-based (vs. text-based) presentations yield less-polarized comparative attitudes, reduce sensitivity to benchmarks, attenuate joint–separate preference reversals, and lower choice uptake for comparatively superior options. These effects were specific to comparative tasks; in non-comparative contexts, judgments were indistinguishable across modalities. We further demonstrate that the effect is driven by the ephemerality of speech: making text ephemeral produced results identical to speech. These findings suggest that modality effects in judgment and decision-making are moderated by the comparative nature of the evaluation. This research provides a theoretical bridge between communication modality and evaluability theory, with practical implications for the rapidly growing domain of voice-mediated choice.

  viaSarfatti25

Major news outlets have begun adopting text-to-speech technologies to improve accessibility and convenience. Will listening to news stories affect how they are perceived? Five controlled experiments involving actual news stories show that information is perceived as more trustworthy, truthful, and accurate when heard compared to read. This effect is driven by listening fluency, the ease of listening to complex information. Formats which make understanding speech more difficult can eliminate this effect. These findings offer a new perspective on the differences between listening and reading and provide practical implications for policymakers and the news industry.

According to past research, experiencing difficulty while processing information (disfluency) can lead people to use a systematic information processing style, paying more careful attention and considering information more thoroughly. Though recent researchers have questioned these results, finding no relationship between disfluency and processing style, we provide evidence for the opposite in a consumer choice context. That is, rather than process information systematically, consumers in seven pre-registered large-sample size experiments were more likely to process information heuristically, characterized by less in-depth processing, leading to their reliance on heuristic cues like a well-known brand, a preferred country-of-origin, or a recommendation. Our results suggest that heuristic processing is more likely in a consumer setting, where a “good enough” solution will suffice, while disfluency has no detectable effect in settings where there is an objectively correct solution, like the types of problems studied previously. The findings contribute greatly to our understanding of disfluency and information processing styles and highlight how seemingly ancillary factors in the decision environment can greatly affect consumers’ choices.

Research confirms the option order primacy effect across various fields. To aid consumers in making informed choices, we propose reversing the sequence of loss/gain information presentation, eliminating the primacy effect. Experiments suggest attention and fluency aren’t the sole mechanisms. This intervention offers a distinctive solution to decision biases.

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Research confirms the option order primacy effect across various fields. To aid consumers in making informed choices, we propose reversing the sequence of loss/gain information presentation, eliminating the primacy effect. Experiments suggest attention and fluency aren’t the sole mechanisms. This intervention offers a distinctive solution to decision biases.

Five experiments (N=3,325) reveal that listening to options (vs. reading them) is harder for consumers when they must rely on memory to evaluate options, as when making comparisons. This difficulty when listening can reduce consumers’ purchase likelihood, and it can shift their choices, as they focus on easily understandable product descriptions such as “like new” or “recommended” when listening versus reading. Listening presents challenges due to speech’s ephemeral nature, placing a higher burden on memory. However, an experiment using voice speakers in consumers’ homes demonstrates a speech format that reduces memory burden and improves purchase likelihood by facilitating effective comparisons.

We observed a primacy effect such that riskier options were chosen more frequently when they were presented first only when gain attributes were described before loss attributes for each option. Future studies will explore the mechanism for this pattern, which may be related to differences in attention assigned to loss and gain.

People rate products described by narrators with gender-ambiguous voices less favorably than when they are described by clearly male or female narrators due to social disfluency—an uneasy feeling related to difficulty understanding the gender of the speaker. These effects can be eliminated by increasing familiarity with the voices.

In six studies (N=1,819), people rated products described by narrators with gender-ambiguous voices less favorably than when they were described by clearly male or female narrators due to social disfluency (difficulty understanding the gender of the narrator). These initial automatic negative reactions could be overcome by increasing exposure.

Financial advisors or insurance sellers often need to decide which product and what information to introduce first. In this research, we demonstrate that the primacy effect (consumers choose the first presented option) in sequentially presented products can be easily reduced by reversing the presentation order of loss and gain attributes.

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With the advent of voice technology, consumers increasingly interact with technological devices orally (i.e., by speaking) rather than manually (i.e., by typing, clicking, and touching). This roundtable aims to examine how this shift from manual to oral communication with technology influences consumer behavior. We will discuss fundamental conceptual differences between oral and manual communication, methodological challenges of studying cross-modality effects in interactions with technology, and avenues for future research.

Melzner, Johann, Andrea Bonezzi, Jonah Berger, Christian Hildebrand, Mansur Khamitov, Anne-Kathrin Klesse, David Luna, Shiri Melumad, Vicki G. Morwitz, Kurt P. Munz, Demi Oba, Massimiliano Ostinelli, Aner Sela, and Ana Valenzuela

  Best Student Presentation

Contrary to previous findings on the association between disfluency and information processing, three preregistered studies demonstrate that disfluency causes consumers to simplify difficult-seeming decisions by using heuristics. The results demonstrate that disfluency leads to a greater reliance on “heuristic” reasoning where consumers utilize information such as a brand name or a recommendation to make their choice. This tendency to rely on heuristic information in the face of disfluency is more pronounced among decision-makers high in Need for Cognition.

Does using a gender-neutral voice affect information processing and product judgment? Processing Fluency literature says the difficulty in information processing leads to the negative judgment of the information and product presented in that information at the metacognitive level. While research in this area has involved textual information, scant research attention on fluency has been paid to the social nature of communication. We investigate a novel concept, “social-processing fluency”, related to the ease or difficulty of identifying the demographic information about the source of voice information (i.e., gender) used to determine social categorization.

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Six experiments demonstrate that choosing from options presented by voice (versus text) increases the cognitive burden on consumers (due to difficulty making comparisons), leading them to choose recommended items more often but also to defer choice at higher rates. Auditory consumers focus on context-independent “evaluable” product features to guide judgment.