Seeing Ourselves in Others: Consumer Compliance With Recommendations Made By Ambiguous Agents

This research investigates how compliance with a recommendation made by another consumer is affected by the amount of information provided about the reviewer and the perceived similarity of the reviewer. In Study 1 we demonstrate that, given no information about a reviewer (i.e., the reviewer’s characteristics are ambiguous), consumers project their own characteristics onto the reviewer, resulting in compliance likelihoods that are similar to compliance with a recommendation made by a reviewer presented as similar (vs. dissimilar) to the target consumer. In Study 2 we demonstrate that the false consensus effect is responsible for these results.

Citation:

David A. Norton and Rebecca Naylor (2009) ,"Seeing Ourselves in Others: Consumer Compliance With Recommendations Made By Ambiguous Agents", in NA - Advances in Consumer Research Volume 36, eds. Ann L. McGill and Sharon Shavitt, Duluth, MN : Association for Consumer Research, Pages: 1053-1053.