The Effect of Target Familiarity on Prediction Accuracy

Lerouge, Davy; Warlop, Luk

The Effect of Target Familiarity on Prediction Accuracy

Davy Lerouge
Tilburg University
The Netherlands

Luk Warlop
Katholieke Universiteit Leuven
Belgium

Many buying decisions require predictions of another person’s product attitudes. Yet, consumers are often inaccurate predictors, even for familiar others. We provide strong evidence that target familiarity can even hurt accuracy in the presence of attitude feedback. Although overprojection and lack of product-specific attitude information have been identified as possible reasons for prediction inaccuracy, our results suggest a retrieval explanation. When presented with product-specific attitude feedback, predictors adapted their level of projection and encoded the attitude information, but they did not use this information. Instead, they retrieved less diagnostic, pre-stored information about the familiar targets to predict their product attitudes.

Citation:

Davy Lerouge and Luk Warlop (2006) ,"The Effect of Target Familiarity on Prediction Accuracy", in NA - Advances in Consumer Research Volume 33, eds. Connie Pechmann and Linda Price, Duluth, MN : Association for Consumer Research, Pages: 680-680.

Authors

Davy Lerouge, Tilburg University
Luk Warlop, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven

Volume

NA - Advances in Consumer Research Volume 33 | 2006

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