Fluency and Social Influence; lessons from judgement and decision making - Petrova et al. - Article

To decrease the frequency of undesirable actions, other public service messages ask recipients to imagine potential negative outcomes. Yet, Cialdini’s research reveals that because the negative outcomes are often abstract, such messages can make these outcomes seem less likely to occur, in contrast to what the message intended.

Over the last couple of decades, numerous studies have indeed shown that the experience of ease or difficulty in generating thoughts, generating images, processing information or making a decision can have a profound influence on judgments and behaviour. Here, we examine the implications of these findings for the science and practice of influence and show how failure to take the recipient’s influence experience into account can cause influence attempts to backfire.

One of the most basic forces that influence our behaviour are the actions and opinions of others. Unfortunately, we are poor at tracking how often we’ve heard or seen something. We rely on whether it seems familiar. Although considerable research has demonstrated the influence of social norms, less is known about how people come to identify norms in the first place. Incorporating a fluency perspective reveals a powerful insight: To infer a norm, people draw on the experience of familiarity, but are insensitive to where this fluency experience comes from. Hence, their perceptions may often be faulty and driven by fluency variables that are unrelated to the actual frequency of the relevant opinion or behaviour.

Empirical research further demonstrates that variables that facilitate fluent processing, create the impression that a statement is true. This fluency-familiarity truth link suggests that frequent repetition and design qualities can increase the influence of a message beyond its effect on attention and retention. It also presents a problem when we attempt to counter misleading information.

Various types of messages try to correct for misleading information by first repeating the false information and then refuting it with counter arguments. Although people may rely on corrective information when this is highly accessible, the corrective facts may not be prominent in the audience’s mind. Given this possibility, organizations may find it safer to refrain from reiterating false information and instead try to make the true information as fluent and familiar as possible. When corrective information is offered, it is important to ensure that the corrective information easily comes to mind when the audience encounters the false information again.

It is not surprising that familiar options feel safer than unfamiliar ones. People perceive technologies, investments and leisure activities as less risky the more familiar they are with them. The effects of disfluency are not limited to the perception of negative risks, but can also be observed in the perception of risks that people consider desirable. The link between fluency, familiarity and risk perception has many practical implications. In certain domains, risk is valued.

We often think about the future trying to predict whether a particular outcome will occur. Yet, despite our preoccupation with that what comes next, we tend to grossly mispredict the future. The experience of fluency in creating mental images also affects how we estimate the likelihood of undertaking specific actions, such as purchasing a product. The more difficult it is to imagine the behaviour, the less likely we think we are to engage in it. This uncovers an important prospect.

A more subtle implication concerns the effectiveness of hypothetical questions as an influence strategy. One reason for the effectiveness of this approach is that once presented with a hypothetical question about engaging in an activity, people spontaneously try to imagine this activity.

High perceived effort is a major impediment of behaviour change, from adopting an exercise routine to changing one’s diet. But here is what fluency research reveals: The experience of fluency can dramatically change one’s perceptions of the amount of effort it would take to complete the task.

If we want people to adopt a new behaviour, it is important that our recommendation not only conceptually clear and easy to follow, but also perceptually easy to process. The goal to present the information in a unique and stylistically interesting way often leads to adopting a unique, but difficult to process message. This can have the backfire effect of making the recommended behaviour seem unduly demanding. Disfluency may be advantageous when the goal is to create a perception of effort. Fluency (also called volubility and loquaciousness) is the property of a person or of a system that delivers information quickly and with expertise.

Our motivation to be consistent with previous choices has been well recognized as a profound source of influence. From a fluency perspective, the experience of difficulty in making a choice can have substantial negative effects. Even when the choices are limited to two options, they frequently involve difficult trade-offs. The experience of difficulty making these trade-offs can have various unintended consequences.

One of the most known fluency effects is the mere exposure effect. The more often we see an object, the more we like it. From a fluency perspective, repeated exposure is just one of many variables that facilitate fluent processing. Our preference for fluently processed stimuli underlies many of the variables known to influence aesthetic experience.

Fluency experiences cannot only directly influence our judgments, but they can also influence how we think. By influencing the level of abstractness, or by influencing the way how carefully we consider the information at hand.

People are highly sensitive to their experiences of ease or difficulty. Unfortunately they are much less sensitive to where these experiences come from.

Fluency can influence judgments and behaviour through 4 routes:

• People may directly attribute the experience of fluency to other aspects of the object.
• People draw on naive theories to infer the meaning of any encountered difficulty
• Fluency elicits positive affect.
• Fluency can influence the way information is processed and increase heuristic thinking.

As a result, any variable that facilitates or impairs fluency can profoundly affect the effectiveness of influence attempts.