The effects of easy and difficult business relationship evaluations on purchase intentions.
| Autor | Viacava, Juan Jose Camou |
1 Introduction
Individuals usually seek to simplify decisions using "shortcuts" or heuristics that minimize cognitive efforts and avoid stress and strain in their decisions (Kahneman, 2011). However, these "shortcuts" usually produce some biases that influence attitudes and decisions. In relationship marketing, one of these biases has its origin in satisfaction evaluations, leading to a pattern of future expectations associated with higher repurchase rates (Oliver, 2010). Similarly, the development of loyalty can also be seen as a cognitive bias that directs attitudes and behaviors (Bloemer, Ruyter, & Peeters, 1998). The explanation for these biased behaviors is based on the positive memories experienced (Lazarus, 1991), but it is also necessary to highlight the influence of fluency (Schwarz, 2004) on the creation and reinforcement of these biases, intensifying the impact of intuitions and opinions (Aydin, 2016; Simons & Nelson, 2006, 2007).
At one end of the fluency continuum, individuals perceive ease in cognitive processing, creating comfort and pleasure (Labroo & Pocheptsova, 2016; Nunes, Ordani, & Valsevia, 2015) that would lead to biases such as: intensifying the effects of what is being interpreted (Claypool, Mackie, & Garcia-Marques, 2015; Landwehr, Golla, & Reber, 2017); evaluating and judging something more quickly (Schwarz, 2004); a greater perception of veracity, familiarity, learning, intelligence, and value (Alter & Openhaimer, 2006, 2008, 2009; Kornell, Rhodes, Castel, & Tauber, 2011; Miele & Molden, 2010; Openhaimer, 2004; Yang, Huang, & Shanks, 2018). In addition, as evaluations get more intuitive, faster, and more confident (Kahneman, 2011), subsequent judgments and decisions show more biases (Aydin, 2016; Simons & Nelson, 2006, 2007). Perceived difficulty can be observed at the other end of the fluency continuum (Sanchez & Jaeger, 2015), linked to cognitive discomfort and thoughts about risk. However, if individuals could be stimulated to deliberate or to use their self-control (Kahneman, 2011), they would not develop overconfidence and would avoid using simple opinions and prior and/or erroneous beliefs--or even xenophobic thoughts--that could bias their decisions (Alter, 2013; Hernandez & Preston, 2013; Ryffel & Wirth, 2018).
Therefore, if consumers experienced easy and difficult assessments and judgments, would it be possible to lessen the impact of positive or even negative business experiences just by making the consumer doubt the evaluation? Is confidence in evaluations and subsequent decisions differently affected by positive and negative commercial experiences? In order to answer these questions, this study aims to verify the impact of fluency on commercial relationship evaluations and on subsequent future purchase intentions. In addition, the study also presents a new fluency manipulation (based on Oppenheimer, 2004), not requiring previous tasks to affect later evaluations, but directly using easy or difficult satisfaction evaluations, and therefore enabling it to be applied in practice.
2 Literature Review
Despite the need and importance, in several situations consumers do not rationally and structurally judge the attributes, benefits, and costs of each purchase. Instead, they use a series of simplified rules (i.e. heuristics) without making in-depth comparisons and evaluations (Baron, 2008). These heuristics generate systematic errors, called biases, arising from factors such as lack of self-control and fluency (Kahneman, 2011). The latter is the subject of this study.
2.1 Effects of fluency on evaluations and judgments
Fluency can be understood as a continuum between ease (fluency) and difficulty (commonly called disfluency) of processing some type of information. The intensity of fluency can originate from the individual's own characteristics or from the situation being evaluated and it can be classified as perceptual or conceptual fluency (Schwarz, 2004). Perceptual fluency results from physical-visual characteristics, such as changes in brightness, contrast, or even in the print quality of texts. Conceptual fluency results from ease of processing a given stimulus, such as easy to pronounce names or even rhyming phrases. As an example, studies show that easy to pronounce stock names or symbols, therefore having greater fluency, create greater expectations of profitability for investors (Alter & Oppenheimer, 2006).
Stimuli perceived as easy have a greater tendency to be hedonically processed (Duke, Fiacconi, & Kohler, 2014). Thus, in general, people prefer music (rhythms and their lyrics), texts, and the like with simpler content, as they get cognitive comfort from the pleasure of being able to understand it without much effort (Bayliss, Constable, Tipper, & Kritikos, 2013; Maier & Dost, 2018; Nunes, et al., 2015). Ease of processing is linked to perceived pleasure, reducing uncertainties and eliciting more positive responses when evaluating products (Labroo & Pocheptsova, 2016). This cognitive comfort can even increase the acceptance of an idea, topic, or even a product (Labroo, Dhar, & Schwarz, 2008). However, pleasure is not felt when processing all stimuli types, only positive ones (Albrecht & Carbon, 2014). That is, there is no preference or pleasure in processing negative stimuli. In this sense, extreme ease of processing intensifies the effects of previously processed information, whether positive or negative, stimulating biases that influence future decisions (Claypool et al., 2015; Landwehr et al., 2017).
Although individuals have a preference for easier stimuli, difficulty (disfluency) generally helps them process information more carefully, acting as a warning to prevent more intuitive forms of reasoning (Alter, 2013; Alter, Oppenheimer, Epley, & Eyre, 2007). Difficulty in cognitive processing is able to interrupt confirmatory biases, beliefs, previous expectations, and prejudices (Hernandez & Preston, 2013), leading to better event coding, better memory retrieval later (Diemand-Yauman, Oppenheimer, & Vaughan, 2011; Oppenheimer & Alter, 2013), and better information processing. Thus, perceived difficulty provides superior results (Charness & Dave, 2017) by enforcing greater deliberation in the decision-making process (Weissgerber & Reinhard, 2017).
Heuristics and their biases are associated with System 1, where the process of seeking cognitive comfort leads to less and faster deliberation, producing overconfidence. On the other hand, in the case of System 2, there is slow thinking, more deliberation, and greater attention (Kahneman, 2011). Likewise, individuals who have previously had easy cognitive processing experiences overestimate their knowledge about these experiences, generating greater confidence (Ryffel & Wirth, 2018). Ease of processing can induce a greater perception of veracity (Silva, Garcia-Marques, & Reber, 2017) and overconfidence, because individuals do not have to deal with inconsistencies or new interpretations in deliberations (Bajsanski, Zauhar, & Valerjev, 2019). Similarly, studies testing the effects of technical versus common words (or even easy versus difficult to read typefaces) point out that perceived ease is related to a greater perception of information confidence, while difficulty leads to a greater risk perception (Park, Herr, & Kim, 2016).
Therefore, easily formed intuitions and opinions not only lead to results with greater perceived reliability, but also to greater confidence in the evaluation or judgment itself. Overconfident individuals do not engage in new information processing and are directly biased by these intuitions. However, if they have faced difficulties in forming these intuitions, this would signal to them that less intuitive alternatives should be considered, or even chosen (Simons & Nelson, 2006, 2007). As a result, individuals who easily formed prior choices of which product to buy would have greater confidence that these prior choices would be right, increasing subsequent purchase intentions (Aydin, 2016).
However, evidence indicates that this would not always happen because not only perceived ease or difficulty can affect confidence, but also mood states (Koch & Forgas, 2012) and the evaluated valence of memories (Kensinger & Schacter, 2008).
2.2 Effects of the valence of memories on evaluations and judgments
Positive mood states lead to judgments that are perceived as "more true," causing the maintenance of confidence, while negative mood states lead to less confidence in information processing (Koch & Forgas, 2012).
Confidence in what is being evaluated is negatively affected by negative recovered memories, involving more effort and need for control to avoid unwanted results (Caplan, Sommer, Madan, & Fujiwara, 2019). Negative emotions induce a more concrete adaptive processing state, leading individuals to process information with greater attention and for longer periods (Matovic, Kock, & Forgas, 2014). These effects relate to evidence that negative events are more accessible to memory, enhancing the recollection of details and central facts (Hostler, Wood, & Armitage, 2018; Kensinger & Schacter, 2008) that are essential and intrinsic to the events (Bookbinder & Brainerd, 2017; Kensinger, 2009) because they include more distinct memories (Brewin & Langley, 2019).
Negative emotions stimulate the ability to recapitulate episodes not only due to greater attention to coding and memories retrieval, but also due to the greater reactivation of these emotions (Bowen, Kark, & Kensinger, 2017). Thus, negative aspects, facts, and emotions result in greater attention and prevention in general (Prato & John, 1991), as well as a greater problem-solving focus (Orita & Hattori, 2018).
In contrast, positive memories lead to more general and peripheral attention (Talarico, Berntsen, & Rubin, 2009). These memories need more associations to be remembered (Madan, Scott, & Kensinger, 2019) and they therefore have...
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