How Perceptual Disfluency Affects Consumer Choices
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 11074409 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Shahryar Mohsenin (0000-0002-4560-2887, University of Technology Sydney (UTS) Shahryar Mohsenin ( [email protected] ) is assistant professor of marketing, Department of Marketing, , Ultimo Rd, 2007 Sydney, NSW, Australia), Kurt P Munz (0000-0002-5459-7602, Bocconi University Kurt P. Munz ( [email protected] ) is assistant professor of marketing, Marketing Department, , Via Roberto Sarfatti 25, 20136 Milano, MI, Italy) |
| Editors | June Cotte (0000-0003-0770-8338), Oleg Urminsky (0000-0003-4390-386X), Manoj Thomas (0000-0002-3548-6309) |
| Year | 2025 |
| Publication date | 2025-11-25 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Journal of Consumer Research (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0093-5301 • E-ISSN: 1537-5277 |
| Publisher | Oxford University Press (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1093/jcr/ucaf062 |
| OpenAlex | W4416641806 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 57 |
Marketing materials often create difficulties for consumers through elements like unconventional fonts or distracting background images, leading to perceptual disfluency—a sense of difficulty encoding information. During choices, consumers can mistake perceptual disfluency for choice difficulty, a feeling of indecision. Building on this idea, 11 preregistered experiments (N = 9,042) show that when making choices, perceptual disfluency can lead consumers to rely on information that feels more intuitively appealing to them, such as a familiar brand, a preferred country of origin, or a recommendation, rather than on information they must carefully consider like numerical product specifications. Differing from the effect of perceptual disfluency in other situations, during choices, this effect occurs because consumers process information less deeply, engaging in relatively more intuitive and less analytical processing. This effect is amplified when consumers endorse a “fast-is-accurate” lay theory. In contrast, it does not occur when consumers do not mistake perceptual disfluency for choice difficulty, as when prompted to consider the actual reason for the disfluency, or when not making a choice
Feeling · Heuristics · Misattribution of memory · Mistake · Perception · Process (computing) · Product (mathematics) · Behavioral Health and Interventions · Decision-Making and Behavioral Economics · Social and Intergroup Psychology
Effects of Perceptual Fluency on Affective Judgments
The Mere Exposure Effect
Illusions of immediate memory
Metacognitive experiences as information
Measuring Processing Fluency
Overcoming intuition
Preference Fluency in Choice
The Effect of Conceptual and Perceptual Fluency on Brand Evaluation
Metacognitive Experiences in Consumer Judgment and Decision Making
Uniting the Tribes of Fluency to Form a Metacognitive Nation
A Theory of Heuristic and Systematic Information Processing
SPSS and SAS procedures for estimating indirect effects in simple mediation models
Disfluent fonts do not help people to solve math and non-math problems regardless of their numeracy
Effects of Perceptual Fluency on Judgments of Truth
Decision-Making Style
The Art of Misspelling
Decision speed and choice regret
In the Eye of the Beholder
Central and peripheral routes to persuasion
Ease of retrieval as information
Cognitive Reflection and Decision Making
Country of Origin as a Stereotype
Memory and Attentional Factors in Consumer Choice
Consumer Learning
The Fit of Thinking Style and Situation
Of Frog Wines and Frowning Watches
An Examination of Different Explanations for the Mere Exposure Effect
Effects of Brand Logo Complexity, Repetition, and Spacing on Processing Fluency and Judgment
The Effect of Time Pressure on Consumer Choice Deferral
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |