Easy does it: The role of fluency in cue weighting

By Anuj K. Shah, Daniel M. Oppenheimer. 2007

173 citations recorded by the source corpus.

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.

Subfields: Applied Psychology, General Decision Sciences, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/26d1d4fdaec8dfa3fb1bd348819110ae3235957c

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Citations in the corpus

Processing Fluency and Investors’ Reactions to Disclosure Readability (2012, unknown): “Consistent with this prediction, Shah and Oppenheimer (2007) find that when both more and less fluent information is presented, individuals weight the more fluent information more heavily in their judgments.”
Heuristics made easy: an effort-reduction framework. (2008, background): “Typically, more valid cues are weighted more heavily; however, by using nonvalidity based cue selection, decision makers inherently simplify cue weighting principles because they do not have to judge the predictive accuracy of each cue (for a discussion, see Shah & Oppenheimer, 2007).”
A (Blurry) Vision of the Future: How Leader Rhetoric about Ultimate Goals Influences Performance (2014, methodology): “Research on fluency suggests that individuals prefer phrases that are easier to process cognitively (e.g., fewer syllables, shorter words) (Shah & Oppenheimer, 2007).”
How does readability influence investors' judgments? Consistency of benchmark performance matters (2015, background): “In promoting high readability, regulators can consider specifying additional guidelines warning against managers who strategically highlight favorable performance indicators and obfuscate unfavorable performance indicators.”
Uniting the Tribes of Fluency to Form a Metacognitive Nation (2009, unknown): “Researchers have taken advantage of these differences to contrast stimuli that roll off the tongue with others that are more difficult to say (Shah & Oppenheimer, 2007; Whittlesea & Williams, 1998).”