When Seeing Many Types of Wine Makes You More Sensitive to Technological Threats: Unrelated, Prior Categorizations and Reactions to Change

The ability to detect a change, to accurately assess the magnitude of the change, and to react to that change in a commensurate fashion, is of critical importance in many decision domains. Thus, it is important to understand the factors that systematically affect people’s reactions to change. To that end, in this paper we document a counterintuitive effect: decision makers’ reactions to a change (e.g., an emerging technology), are systematically affected by the type of categorizations they encounter in an unrelated, prior task (e.g., how a wine store categorizes and displays its wines). We find that unrelated, prior exposure to narrow (vs. broad) categorizations leads to stronger (vs. weaker) reactions to a given change. These differential reactions occur because the prior categorizations, albeit unrelated, alter the extent to which the presented change is perceived as either a relatively large change or a relatively small one.

Citation:

Amitav Chakravarti, Christina Fang, and Zur Shapira (2011) ,"When Seeing Many Types of Wine Makes You More Sensitive to Technological Threats: Unrelated, Prior Categorizations and Reactions to Change", in E - European Advances in Consumer Research Volume 9, eds. Alan Bradshaw, Chris Hackley, and Pauline Maclaran, Duluth, MN : Association for Consumer Research, Pages: 474.