Effects of Time for Deliberation and Disfluency on Omission Neglect

Abstract

The use of disfluency in marketing signage has more complex effects than what past research suggests. Time plays an important role in consumer information processing of signage presented disfluently. Three experimental studies suggest that the effects of disfluency on the awareness of missing information, purchase likelihood, and likelihood of future surprise depend on whether consumers have more or less time to process the information. When they have a limited amount of time, disfluency improves their awareness of missing information, leading to not only a lower likelihood of immediate purchase but also less surprise when important omissions are revealed later. Nevertheless, the effects are attenuated when consumers have a greater amount of time.

Omission neglect and consumer judgment and inference based on limited evidence.

“…When the target lacked the extra feature, however, search times increased dramatically with the number of distractors that were presented. Wu (2019) partially replicated these results using a verbal description of a new laptop computer. Participants received a description of a new laptop containing four presented features (e.g., Intel processor, HD graphics, four-cell battery, ultrafast storage) and four missing features.…”

“…This illusion has been amplified by the internet, a network that provides an enormous amount of information or knowledge to anyone who has access to a computer (Fisher et al, 2015). However, when we believe we are knowledgeable about items and processes that we do not fully understand, we are often unmotivated to continue to search for information (Fernbach et al, 2012;Wu, 2019). This lack of information search leads to a tendency to neglect information that was not presented.…”

“…However, this effect was reduced for experts, and when a well-known brand was presented to novices, they were insensitive to omissions regardless of the level of diagnosticity of the attribute information. Wu et al (2019) showed that the fluency with which the presented information can be processed can also influence sensitivity to omissions. The presented information seemed more diagnostic and produced greater interference with the ability to consider missing information when this information was presented in an easy-to-read font.…”