The Failure to Transmit Certainty: Causes, Consequences, and Remedies
Résumé
Little is known about how consumers share or transmit certainty in their attitudes to one another, despite the recognized importance of attitude certainty in influencing behavior. This research proposes that certainty, as a secondary cognition, is less accessible to consumers and thus more susceptible to being lost in transmission compared to attitudes, which are primary cognitions. Across experiments, consumers failed to communicate their certainty when sharing their opinions with one another and this was due to lower accessibility of certainty. Implications for understanding the transmission of certainty, as well as remedies for increasing its likelihood of transmission, are presented.