Easy Does It: The Role of Fluency in Cue Weighting

We propose that people weight fluent, or easy to process, information more heavily than disfluent information when making judgments. Cue fluency was manipulated independent of objective cue validity in three studies, the findings from which support our hypothesis. In Experiment 1, participants weigh...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Judgment and Decision Making Vol. 2; no. 6; pp. 371 - 379
Main Authors: Shah, Anuj K, Oppenheimer, Daniel M
Format: Journal Article
Language:English
Published: Tallahassee Society for Judgment and Decision Making 01.12.2007
Cambridge University Press
Series:Judgment and Decision Making
Subjects:
cue weighting
Decision making
Experiments
fluency
judgment
Validity
judgment
cue weighting
fluency
ISSN:1930-2975, 1930-2975
Online Access:Get full text
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Summary:We propose that people weight fluent, or easy to process, information more heavily than disfluent information when making judgments. Cue fluency was manipulated independent of objective cue validity in three studies, the findings from which support our hypothesis. In Experiment 1, participants weighted a consumer review more heavily when it was written in a clear font than in a less clear font. In Experiment 2, participants placed more weight on information when it was in focus than when it was blurry. In Experiment 3, participants placed more weight on financial information from brokerage firms with easy to pronounce names than those with hard to pronounce names. These studies demonstrate that fluency affects cue weighting independent of objective cue validity.
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ISSN:1930-2975
1930-2975
DOI:10.1017/S1930297500000516