The Impact of Confidence on Country Cue Bias

Citation:

Jan Hack Katz (1995) ,"The Impact of Confidence on Country Cue Bias", in E - European Advances in Consumer Research Volume 2, eds. Flemming Hansen, Provo, UT : Association for Consumer Research, Pages: 2.

European Advances in Consumer Research Volume 2, 1995      Page 2

THE IMPACT OF CONFIDENCE ON COUNTRY CUE BIAS

Jan Hack Katz, Cornell University

Country-of-origin has been widely investigated for many years. Though often isolated in its own literature, country-of-origin is not substantially different from beliefs about other categories, such as brand or stereotype. All are multi-trait beliefs about a collectivity, either product or person. They have been shown to induce biased judgments.

Country-of-origin has been shown, in general, to be relatively weak - easily overwhelmed by other information such as warranty, retail channel, and corporate brand. In terms of social stereotypes, some appear to have a robust effect while others appear less robust. To some extent, differences in research results appear to arise because of variation in the cognitive processes induced by the experimental designs. Still, the results seem to beg the question as to whether some characteristic of the expectations themselves induce these different effects.

Confidence is one possible explanation for the variation in expectation effect. In addition, confidence is clearly linked to the amount of information on which a judgment is based. Many high-profile products from Japan, for example, are available in the United States and there have been many magazine and newspaper articles about Japanese products and production processes. In comparison, products from Switzerland, while available in the United States, are less commonly known or read about.

The objective of this research is to investigate this link between confidence in a category-based expectation (in this case country-of-origin expectation) and how it mediates the impact of new information on product judgment. The core hypothesis is that expectations held with greater confidence will continue to affect judgment under conditions where the impact of lower confidence expectations will be eliminated. While the impact of low confidence expectations will be eliminated with minor alternative information, the impact of high confidence expectations will continue to be felt.

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