“The struggle isn't real”: How need for cognitive closure moderates inferences from disfluency

Abstract

Prior research suggests that disfluency leads to unfavorable product judgments and can be mitigated by debiasing techniques (i.e., explicit warnings about disfluency). We suggest a moderating role for the need for cognitive closure (NFCC), such that when information about a favorable brand is present, disfluency leads to less favorable judgments for low NFCC consumers but not for high NFCC consumers. Moreover, warnings about disfluency mitigate the negative effect for low NFCC consumers, but backfire for high NFCC ones. Across five experiments, we demonstrate these effects through individual trait differences and cognitive load manipulations of NFCC. We suggest that the backfiring effect among high NFCC consumers is due to shifts in attention away from brand reputation towards the experience of disfluency, making disfluency (vs. brand reputation) the primary judgmental cue. Implications of the findings for consumer inference are discussed.