The Role of Metacognition in Consumers’ Judgments

SESSION OVERVIEW Metacognition refers to people’s cognitions about their own thought processes. Over the past two decades psychologists have shown that our judgments and decisions are influenced not only by the available information, but also by the subjective ease or difficulty with which the information is processed. In this special session, we bring together three research papers that present hitherto unexplored aspects metacognition in consumers’ judgments. The three papers in this session share two common features: All the three papers demonstrate novel effects of metacognitive experiences that have not been shown in the extant literature. By demonstrating that metacognitive experiences influence consumers’ emotional judgments, price evaluations and brand choice, the three papers, together, argue for a more pivotal role for metacognition research in consumer psychology. All three papers present a series of experiments to uncover the underlying psychological mechanisms and thus offer new theoretical insights about metacognitive processes. The first paper, by Rucker, Briñol and Petty, examines the effect of metacognitive experiences on emotional judgments. Rucker et al. suggest that subjective ease has the power to moderate consumers’ emotional responses. Specifically, their experiments demonstrate that emotions are felt more strongly, and have a greater effect on consumer behavior, when it is easy to construe the emotion-inducing events. This paper, thus, not only uncovers a novel effect of subjective ease, but also offers new insights into the interplay of affect and cognition in consumer behavior. The second paper by Thomas and Morwitz examines the effects of metacognition in judgments of numerical differences. Judgments of numerical differences are ubiquitous. For example, while comparing two products, people have to judge whether the price difference is small or large. While deciding whether to purchase a product on discount, people have to judge whether the difference between the regular price and sale price is small or large. This paper presents convincing empirical evidence for a counterintuitive hypothesis: People perceive the numerical difference to be larger when the difference is easier to compute than when it is difficult to compute, even when the arithmetic difference is not larger. A series of experiments reveal that this effect is on account of nonconscious attribution of the metacognitive experience induced by computational fluency to the analog distance between the numerical stimuli. The domain of choice has always been a challenge for metacognition researchers. Little is known about the effects of processing fluency on brand choice. Huber (2004, p. 359) eloquently summarized the challenge: “The elegance of naïve theories (used for metacognitive inferences) seems to break down in the domain of choices...” The third paper by Chung and Mitchell takes on this challenge to identify conditions when perceptual fluency will influence choice from a limited set of brands. Their results indicate that perceptual fluency affects brand choice only under low motivation and opportunity conditions. Interestingly, fluency affects choice even when the evaluation of the brand is negative. Their results also suggest that attitudes formed toward the alternatives may not influence choice when the choice is based on metacognitive experiences. The similarity of the theoretical constructs across the three papers will facilitate a coherent session. Yet, each paper addresses a different substantive problem and thus makes unique contributions to advance our knowledge of metacognition.