Events

Professor Nathan Novemsky
Professor of Marketing
Yale School of Management
Yale University

ABSTRACT

Beliefs and attitudes about products and brands are presumed to be influenced by experiences with relevant products. In this research, we examine whether and under which circumstances this presumption is correct. In a series of laboratory and field experiments, we show that when belief and experience diverge, experience induces belief updating only when people are nudged to appraise the experience at the time of consumption. Contrary to lay beliefs, surprisingly good and surprisingly bad product experiences have no reliable effect on beliefs and choices when there is no prompt to appraise the experience while it is happening. When there is such a prompt, beliefs and choices shift in the direction consistent with the surprising experience both immediately and several days later. We suggest these results arise because effortful propositional thinking is required to change explicit beliefs (Associative–Propositional Evaluation Model,  Gawronski and Bodenhausen, 2006). Our studies suggest that in many experiences, consumers do not expend the effort to articulate their momentary evaluations and therefore, do not update their prior beliefs.