When Are Predictions of Preference Self-Fulfilling? Dissertation Proposal

Preliminary rough draft. Please do not cite or quote. 1 One of the most important concerns for marketers is coping with and changing people's theories about brands or products. A notable example is the Pepsi Challenge, a campaign conducted by PepsiCo in order to make cola customers aware that Pepsi Cola beats Coca Cola in blind taste tests. Indeed, decades of blind taste tests suggest that consumers' theories or beliefs about a brand affect how that brand is experienced (e.g., Allison & Uhl 1964). Often people rate the taste of, say, their favored brand higher than a different brand, but only when the brands' identifying information is available. The belief about a brand functions like a prediction about the experience with the brand; and it appears that these predictions have a knack for coming true. Self-fulfilling predictions The notion that expectations about a brand affect how that brand is experienced concords with a rich tradition of research in social psychology that suggests that predictions (or expectations) bias people's experiences. In these studies predictions or prior expectations are self-fulfilling—people tend to experience events in a manner that fulfills their prior predictions whether due to selective perception or a desire to self-confirm tastes. Some studies manipulate predictions by endowing respondents with different expectations or simply grouping people into experimental conditions according to their pre-existing beliefs (e.g., fans of one team versus fans of a second team), and show that subsequent perception of new data is consistent with those expectations (predictions). Other studies ask people to make explicit predictions and show that subsequent perception of new data is consistent with those predictions. 1 Preference and taste will be used interchangeably in this paper. Levav 2 Manipulated expectations. The majority of studies on self-fulfilling predictions fall under this experimental paradigm. Most relevant to issues of predicting taste, Wilson demonstrate the biasing effect of expectations on affective experiences of cartoon viewing. Participants who were endowed with an expectation that a series of cartoons would be funny rated the cartoons as more amusing than controls who had not been endowed with such an expectation. Similar findings are obtained by Hoch and Ha (1986), who treat advertisements as hypotheses and show that when faced with an ambiguous product (e.g., a mesh shirt), consumers tend to engage in hypothesis-confirming processing. That is, when a product has uncertain or ambiguous benefits, consumers interpret their experience with the product in …