Cognitive Load and Social Media Advertising

Abstract

Social media engagement requires cognitive resources, which subsequently impact the advertisements consumers see while browsing. For the most part, however, advertising practitioners and scholars still study social media ads and messages as if they will receive users’ full attention and cognition. This study has two main contributions. First, we demonstrate that the use of social media induces a measurable degree of cognitive load, presumably because the variety of networking and media components requires users to hold multiple evaluation schemas in working memory. Second, we show that while under cognitive load, participants rely on cues (e.g., number of likes and comments) that trigger heuristics to influence purchase intentions. However, product involvement was found to serve as a boundary condition wherein those under cognitive load did not rely on cues when they had higher involvement with the advertised product. Drawing on the limited capacity model of motivated mediated message processing (LC4MP), this research tests the proposed hypotheses using a pilot study and three experimental studies to provide converging evidence for the influence of social media use on heuristics and subsequent purchase intentions. Analysis of thought elicitation further supports our proposed effect of cognitive load on consumer decision making. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.