Less Explored Aspects of Disfluency: Consumer Judgment and Decision Making

Extensive research has explored how disfluency affects product judgments and evaluations across various consumption domains such as brand evaluation, price perception, and choice deferral. Generally, experiencing disfluency leads to less favorable judgments and evaluations, often resulting in a delay in decision-making. These effects occur because individuals tend to attribute the negative feeling of difficulty processing information to their evaluation of the product itself. While the role of disfluency in consumer judgments and product evaluation has been well-documented, certain aspects of disfluency have received less attention in the context of consumer choice. In Chapter 1, I examined the social aspect of subjective disfluency, specifically the gender of a voice. The aim was to determine whether individuals’ perception of a digital voice assistant’s gender would affect their judgment of a product described by gender-ambiguous voices compared to gender-obvious voices. The findings revealed that people responded unfavorably when assessing products described by narrators with voices that were not clearly identifiable as male or female. This negative reaction stemmed from a sense of discomfort associated with the challenge of determining the narrator’s gender, referred to as social disfluency. The negative effect was primarily attributed to a lack of familiarity with gender-ambiguous voices, as they are less commonly encountered in daily life, rather than social categorization or prejudice against LGBTQ individuals. However, the results indicated that increased exposure to gender-ambiguous voices could help overcome initial negative reactions. In Chapter 2, I aimed to examine the role of subjective disfluency in consumer information processing styles. In contrast to previous findings on the association between disfluency and dual processing modes, this research demonstrated that disfluency leads consumers to simplify complex decisions by relying on mental shortcuts, known as heuristics, rather than engaging in systematic processing of all available information. When information is disfluent and difficult to process, consumers tend to rely more heavily on heuristic product attributes such as brand, country of origin, or recommendations. This tendency to rely on heuristics in the face of disfluency is particularly prominent among fast and effortless decision-makers; however, the effect vanishes when they are informed about the source of disfluency. Finally, in Chapter 3, I investigated the role of framing information as promotion- or prevention-focused in consumer purchase decisions when subjective difficulty in processing information is present. This research aimed to demonstrate the benefits of framing information as promotion benefits (rather than prevention benefits) under conditions of subjective difficulty, drawing upon regulatory focus theory. It was predicted that when information is hard to process, individuals are more likely to rely on prevention-based information about products to justify their decision to reject. As a result of regulatory mismatch under disfluency, featuring promotion-focused claims reduces choice deferral compared to prevention-based information, which increases regulatory fit. Overall, these studies shed light on different aspects of disfluency in judgment and decision-making, examining the impact of gender-ambiguous voices, heuristic processing under the feeling of disfluency, and the role of message framing effects on consumer evaluations and choices.