The Role of Ease of Representation

In three experiments, we examined the meremeasurement effect, wherein simply asking people about their intent to engage in a certain behavior increases the probability of their subsequently engaging in that behavior. The experiments demonstrate that manipulations that should affect the ease of mentally representing or simulating the behavior in question influence the extent of the mere-measurement phenomenon. Participants who were asked about their intention to engage in various behaviors were more likely to engage in those behaviors than participants not asked about their intentions in situations in which mentally simulating the behavior in the intention question was relatively easy. We tested this ease-of-representation hypothesis using both socially desirable and socially undesirable behaviors, and our dependent variables comprised both self-reports and actual behaviors. Our findings have implications for survey research in various social contexts, including assessments of risky behaviors by public health organizations. People are often asked to predict their likelihood of engaging in a behavior in the near or distant future. For instance, political pollsters survey potential voters about their likelihood of voting during election years; market researchers survey customers about their likelihood of purchasing a product; public-health officials survey people about their likelihood of engaging in safe sex. The implicit assumption in virtually all survey research is that the act of responding to the question does not affect the respondent’s probability of subsequently engaging in the behavior. As Fishbein and Ajzen (1975) commented, ‘‘If one wants to know whether or not an individual will perform a given behavior, the simplest and probably most efficient thing that one can do is to ask the individual whether he intends to perform that behavior’’ (p. 369). Although making such predictions might be ‘‘simple,’’ it is not benign. Sherman (1980) showed that errors in predictions of future behavior can be ‘‘self-erasing’’: People who had predicted compliance with socially desirable behaviors were more likely to subsequently engage in those behaviors than were people in a control group, who had made no predictions about the behaviors. Similarly, Greenwald, Carnot, Beach, and Young (1987) reported a 25% increase in voting probability for people who had been asked whether they intended to vote in the following day’s election. Interestingly, questions about behaviors for which people possess negative attitudes (e.g., socially undesirable behaviors) lead to a decrease in the propensity to engage in those behaviors (Sherman, 1980). The self-erasing nature of errors in predictions even extends to predicted purchases of very large items, such as automobiles (Morwitz, Johnson, & Schmittlein, 1993). In a study conducted on a nationally representative sample of more than 40,000 participants, asking a simple question about purchase intent increased actual rates of automobile purchase in the following 6 months more than 35%. Morwitz et al. labeled this phenomenon the mere-measurement effect, as merely measuring intentions changed respondents’ behavior. The mere-measurement effect has been attributed to increased accessibility of an attitude toward the target behavior in the intention question (Feldman & Lynch, 1988; Morwitz & Fitzsimons, 2004). For instance, Fitzsimons and Morwitz (1996) found that asking a category-level intent question about the likelihood of buying an automobile in the next 6 months led to a systematic pattern of behavior at the subcategory level. Respondents who had experience in the category (i.e., who were automobile owners) were substantially more likely to purchase a new automobile of the brand that they currently owned than were respondents who were not asked the intent question. For Address correspondence to Jonathan Levav, Columbia University, Graduate School of Business, Uris Hall, Room 509, 3022 Broadway, New York, NY 10027, e-mail: [email protected]. PSYCHOLOGICAL SCIENCE Volume 17—Number 3 207 Copyright r 2006 Association for Psychological Science nonowners, the purchase increase associated with answering the intent question was observed for brands with a large share of the market. The authors’ explanation was that although current car owners’ attitude toward their automobile brand is most likely to be positive and accessible, nonowners have positive and accessible attitudes toward frequently advertised brands. Morwitz and Fitzsimons (2004) obtained similar results in a laboratory setting when they manipulated attitude accessibility using unfamiliar brands of Canadian candy bars for which participants did not have preexisting attitudes. Although this empirical evidence is consistent with increased accessibility as an explanation for the mere-measurement effect, accessibility alone seems an incomplete explanation in light of the relatively ephemeral nature of semantic primes (Bargh, Gollwitzer, Lee-Chai, Barndollar, & Troetschel, 2001), as well as evidence that mere-measurement effects in the financial-service industry peak approximately 6 months following the intent survey (Dholakia & Morwitz, 2002). This increase cannot be explained by attitude accessibility alone. Indeed, Sherman’s (1980) original explanation for his finding was that participants had engaged in unspecified ‘‘pre-behavioral cognitive work’’ (p. 219). In the experiments we report here, we investigated the nature of the cognitive work that people engage in when responding to intent questionnaires. We conjecture that intention questions trigger the use of a simulation heuristic (Kahneman & Tversky, 1982), such that respondents mentally represent the target behavior and the instances in which they might engage in that behavior. Our ease-of-representation hypothesis posits that the effect of measuring intentions to engage in a behavior on subsequent behavior is an increasing function of the ease with which the behavior is mentally represented by the respondent. Respondents may interpret ease of representation as reflecting likelihood of the behavior, as suggested by research that links ease of retrieval with perceived likelihood (Anderson & Godfrey, 1987; Schwarz & Vaughn, 2002; Tversky & Kahneman, 1973); this ease might, in turn, spur an implementation intention (Gollwitzer, 1999). Thus, intention questions lead to two related mental operations: representation of the target behavior and assessment of how easily the representation came about. Questions about easy-to-represent behaviors should lead to more pronounced mere-measurement effects relative to questions about harder-to-represent behaviors. We tested our hypothesis in three experiments. When possible, we held constant the accessibility of the attitude toward the target behavior, while manipulating ease of representation. Our dependent variables included participants’ actual choices, as well as self-reported behaviors.