Numerosity Effects Research Articles

More Voices Persuade: The Attentional Benefits of Voice Numerosity

The authors posit that in an initial exposure to a broadcast video, hearing different voices narrate (in succession) a persuasive message encourages consumers’ attention and processing of the message, thereby facilitating persuasion; this is referred to as the voice numerosity effect. Across four studies (plus validation and replication studies)—including two large-scale, real-world data sets (with more than 11,000 crowdfunding videos and over 3.6 million customer transactions, and more than 1,600 video ads) and two controlled experiments (with over 1,800 participants)—the results provide support for the hypothesized effect. The effect (1) has consequential, economic implications in a real-world marketplace, (2) is more pronounced when the message is easier to comprehend, (3) is more pronounced when consumers have the capacity to process the ad message, and (4) is mediated by the favorability of consumers’ cognitive responses. The authors demonstrate the use of machine learning, text mining, and natural language processing to process and analyze unstructured (multimedia) data. Theoretical and marketing implications are discussed.

Nutrition labeling, numerosity effects, and vigilance among diet‐sensitive individuals

AbstractNumerosity effects have been investigated in the psychology and marketing literatures. While the effects are documented in outcomes including money and temperature judgments, the potential application and effects of numerosity for nutrition labeling remain unexplored. In this work, we propose that vigilance offers one circumstance when individuals might succumb to numerosity effects. Within the context of nutrition labeling, we propose that the increased vigilance that people with diet‐sensitive illnesses have for specific nutrients on nutrition labels, counter‐intuitively, exacerbates the numerosity effect. We demonstrate that those with diabetes and those with hypertension, for example, are more vigilant for information on nutrition labels relevant to their condition, sugar, and salt, and this greater vigilance counterintuitively leads them to exhibit greater numerosity effects for those nutrients, influencing their food perceptions. As an illustration, we find that a person with hypertension would consider a food product with, say, 3 g of sodium to have less sodium content and be more healthful than one with 3000 mg, although the quantities are equivalent. Our research highlights to policymakers that a “one‐size‐fits‐all” solution for nutrition labeling is not appropriate.

Attribute specification effect on hedonic and utilitarian options

Integrating ideas and theories from the numerosity effect and utilitarian/hedonic consumption, this research explores how hedonic and utilitarian attributes specified with contracted and expanded specifications affect consumer preferences. Results from two experiments indicate an expanded utilitarian attribute enhances consumer preference for choosing the utilitarian option. However, an expanded hedonic attribute does not influence preference for choosing the hedonic option. The relative perceived guilt of the hedonic option and the perceived attractiveness of the utilitarian option mediate the effect. Acquisition format (purchase vs windfall) moderates this effect by influencing consumers’ perceived guilt from choosing the hedonic option. JEL Classification: C91, D12, M31

Leveraging the Numerosity Effect to Influence Perceived Expensiveness of Virtual Items

Selling virtual items is one of the major revenue sources for online game operators. Therefore, the design of game currency systems is important. This research shows that the game currency exchange rate (e.g., $1 = 1,000 game currency is a higher rate than $1 = 10 game currency) affects price perception of virtual items. When the rate is not prominent in players’ minds (e.g., the rate is not mentioned or players have sufficient game currency in their account), players consider a virtual item as more expensive if the rate is higher. In contrast, when the rate is prominent in players’ minds (e.g., the rate is mentioned and no additional information indicates that players already have sufficient game currency, and thus it is irrelevant), players consider a virtual item as cheaper if the rate is higher. In the latter case, higher rate leads to stronger purchase intention of nonsocial, but not social, virtual items. Our findings show currency system design can affect players’ willingness to spend on virtual items thus affecting the revenue of game operators. Moreover, reminders of the actual monetary value of virtual items might help to reduce players’ overspending driven by the biasing effect of the game currency exchange rate.

해외 직구 상황에서 제품 용량 표시의 다수성 효과와 단위효과가 소비자들의 제품 크기 지각에 미치는 영향에 대한 사회적 거리와 단위친숙성의 조절효과에 관한 연구

해외 직구 상황에서 제품 용량 표시의 다수성 효과와 단위효과가 소비자들의 제품 크기 지각에 미치는 영향에 대한 사회적 거리와 단위친숙성의 조절효과에 관한 연구

数字效应对消费者行为的影响及其心理机制

数字效应对消费者行为的影响及其心理机制

Increasing the Sales of Virtual Goods: Leveraging the Numerosity Effect in Virtual Worlds

Selling virtual items (e.g., clothing, weapons, or virtual furniture) serves as one of the major revenue sources for online game operators. Therefore, exploring what specific factors and design attributes may affect the sales of virtual items has become an important issue. This research draws upon prior studies on currency numerosity, contextualizing them to online game contexts to develop several theory-based predictions about how online game currency numerosity affects players’ perceived expensiveness and consequently their purchase intention of virtual items. To test these predictions, we conducted six experiments that investigate numerosity effects in massive multiplayer online games (MMOs) where players can exchange real money for game currency based on an exchange rate in order to purchase virtual items. Results indicate: 1) when the game currency exchange rate is not salient (e.g., game currency exchange rate is not mentioned or players have sufficient game currency in their account), players consider a virtual item as more expensive if the price is high (vs. low) in numerosity; but 2) when the game currency exchange rate is salient (e.g., game currency exchange rate is mentioned and no additional information indicates that it is irrelevant), players consider a virtual item as cheaper if the price is high (vs. low) in numerosity; in addition, 3) in the latter case, numerosity increases players’ purchase intention of non-social, but not social, virtual items through the mediating effect of perceived expensiveness. Our notable findings contribute to the existing literature on numerosity and provide guidance for the design of virtual currency systems in MMOs.

Do Longer or Shorter Budget Temporal Frames Matter? Numerosity Effects, Mental Budgets, and Purchase Intentions

This article explores how temporal frames (short vs. long) of mental budgets influence consumers’ perceived possibility of overspending and their purchase intentions for a target product. Four experiments showed that, compared to a longer temporal frame, consumers in a short temporal frame perceive a greater possibility of overspending and thus have reduced purchase intentions. The perceived possibility of overspending mediates the impact of temporal frames on purchase intentions. However, the impact of temporal frames on purchase intentions is pronounced only if consumers’ budgeted amounts are small, alternative temporal frames are not salient, and consumers have low self-control.

Instrument-Specific Effects of Musical Expertise on Audiovisual Processing (Clarinet vs. Violin)

A large body of evidence has shown that musicians’ brains differ in many ways from nonmusicians’ brains due to the particularly intense and prolonged sensorimotor training involved. Not much is known about the effects of the specific musical instrument played on brain processing of audiovisual information. In this study the effect of musical expertise was investigated in professional clarinetists and violinists. One hundred and eighty videos showing fragments of musical performances played on a violin or a clarinet were presented to musicians of G. Verdi Milan Conservatory and age-matched controls. Half of the musicians were violinists, the other half were clarinetists; event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded from 128 scalp sites and analyzed. Participants judged how many notes were played in each clip. The task was extremely easy for all participants. Over prefrontal areas an anterior negativity response was found to be much larger in controls than in musicians, and in musicians for the unfamiliar over the familiar musical instrument. Furthermore, a later central negativity response showed a lack of note numerosity effect in the brains of musicians for their own instrument, but not for unfamiliar instrument. The data indicate that music training is instrument-specific and that it profoundly affects prefrontal encoding of music-related information and auditory processing.

Blindsight is sensitive to stimulus numerosity and configuration: evidence from the redundant signal effect.

One important, yet relatively unexplored question is whether blindsight, i.e., unconscious visually guided behavior in hemianopic patients, is endowed with basic perceptual properties such as detecting stimulus numerosity and overall configuration. Rather than a forced-choice procedure in which patients are supposed to guess about stimuli presented to the blind hemifield, we used a redundant signal effect paradigm, i.e., the speeding of simple reaction time (RT) when presenting multiple versus single similar stimuli. The presence of an effect of numerosity for the (unseen) stimuli presented to the blind field was indirectly assessed by measuring RT to bilateral versus unilateral stimuli presented to the intact hemifield. Chronic hemianopic patients were tested with unilateral or bilateral black dots, both of which could be either single or quadruple. The latter could either have a fixed spatial configuration representing a diamond or be randomly spatially assembled on every trial. Both configurations covered the same extent of visual field and had the overall same luminance. We found that a numerosity effect as a result of increasing the number of stimuli in the blind field was indeed present but only with the diamond configuration. This is a convincing evidence that this form of blindsight does not depend upon stimulus numerosity per se but is likely to be related to the presence of structured and memorized rather than meaningless changing stimuli.

Are All Units Created Equal? The Effect of Default Units on Product Evaluations

Previous research on attribute framing has shown that people often infer higher quantity from larger numbers, usually with the assumption that the units used to specify this information elicit the same meanings. Drawing on literature on categorization and numerical cognition, the authors challenge this assumption and show that consumers often have preset units for attribute levels that strike an optimal balance between a preference for small numbers and the need for accuracy (study 1a). As such, these default units appear commonly (study 1b). Specifying positive attributes in default units renders products’ evaluation more favorable, even if such specification lowers the nominal value of the attributes (studies 2–4). This effect disappears if participants attribute metacognitive feelings generated by default units to an irrelevant source (study 3). Study 5 shows that a default unit effect is more likely in single evaluation mode, but a numerosity effect may reemerge in joint evaluations.

Numerosity and Consumer Behavior How to Make a 29% Increase Look Bigger: The Unit Effect in Option Comparisons Illusionary Progress in Loyalty Programs: Magnitudes, Reward Distances, and Step-Size Ambiguity Years, Months, and Days versus 1, 12, and 365: The Influence of Units versus Numbers How and Why 1 Year Differs from 365 Days: A Conversational Logic Analysis of Inferences from

Psychologists have long been intrigued by how humans and nonhuman primates process magnitudes such as “how far, how fast, how much, how long, and how many.” This fascination perhaps stems from the fact that magnitude estimations of space, time, and number form the bedrock of most of the decisions that we make in daily life. Decisions about how many cookies to eat, how many payments to make, how many days to wait for a product, all have one thing in common: they require a fundamental ability to be able to discern discriminable elements of the type of stimulus in question. Although distinguishing one from many is an ability that is shared by humans and nonhuman primates, what makes research in this area particularly intriguing is the layer of complexity that arises when we take our ability to mathematically represent different quantities in different units (e.g., 1 month, 4 weeks, 30 days) and map it on to this more fundamental ability. The mapping of this numerical system onto a more generalized magnitude representational system allows us to raise the basic question: do magnitude estimates change when they are represented in a different unit or metric? The current collection of articles on numerosity and consumer behavior (appearing over the last two years) complements and adds to a growing body of work that has already appeared in JCR. The articles start with the assumption that a multitude of physical stimuli, regardless of the domain, can be represented in memory using a magnitude representational system. However, the overlay of a verbal, representational system that draws on our knowledge of mathematical symbols and provides a common basis for interpreting these quantities can sometimes produce effects that skew our ability to estimate things correctly. Thus, although there is no rational reason to suppose that a week might differ from 7 days, it does. The reasons for the occurrence of this numerosity effect are still unclear. Nevertheless, the effect leads to errors in estimation that affect not only how we make progress in goals that are set but also affect, at a more fundamental level, how we perceive things. The first two papers in this collection document this. The first article, by Pandelaere, Briers, and Lembregts, shows that expressing an attribute in a different unit leads to greater perceived difference if the unit is on an expanded or finer-grained scale. Thus, for example, consumers see a greater difference between products that express warranty information in months (84 months) as opposed to years (7 years). The effects are attributed to a tendency for people to focus on the numbers rather than the units in which the quantity is represented. One consequence of this tendency is that as the perceived difference increases, consumers are more likely to switch to the better quality option. The authors show the implications of this for decision making by tracking how consumers switch in a variety of domains that range from product decisions to picking a healthy snack. Interestingly, drawing attention to the possibility that this estimate can be represented in different units eliminates the effect. The second article in this series, by Bagchi and Li, examines the implications of scales that use a greater number of units in the context of loyalty programs (e.g., “earn 10 points per dollar spent and claim your reward when you reach 1,000 points” vs. “earn 1 point per dollar spent to claim a reward when you reach 100 points”). In their studies, not only does the scale representing the distance to be traveled to get the reward vary but also the step sizes to get there. At issue, then, is what consumers use in order to infer their goal progress relative to that of another person. Their findings suggest that when the step size information is ambiguous, goal progress is inferred largely from the magnitude of the scale. Consumers perceive themselves to be further away relative to someone else when the scale consists of a

How Attribute Quantity Influences Option Choice

Products can be described by different numbers of attributes, but can the mere number of attributes presented across a choice set influence what type of options people choose? This article demonstrates that attribute numerosity tends to benefit certain types of options more than others and consequently has systematic effects on choice. Because attributes often serve as a heuristic cue for product usefulness, they benefit options that people perceive as relatively inferior on this dimension. Consistent with this perspective, five studies demonstrate that attribute numerosity benefits hedonic more than utilitarian options by increasing the extent to which the former appear useful. Consequently, increasing attribute quantity equally across the choice set shifts choice toward hedonic options, regardless of whether the attributes are hedonic, utilitarian, or mixed in nature. Consistent with this conceptualization, these effects become amplified when decision makers engage in heuristic processing and when priming makes usefulness salient. The findings have important implications for how marketers present attribute information, for public policy and consumer welfare, and for understanding argument numerosity effects in persuasion more broadly.

How Attribute Quantity Influences Option Choice

Products can be described by different numbers of attributes. But can the mere number of attributes presented across a choice-set influence what type of option people choose? This paper demonstrates that attribute numerosity tends to benefit certain types of options more than others and, consequently, has systematic effects on choice. Because attributes often serve as a heuristic cue for product usefulness, they benefit options that are perceived as relatively inferior on this dimension (e.g., hedonics). Consistent with this perspective, five studies demonstrate that attribute numerosity benefits hedonic more than utilitarian options by increasing the extent to which the former are perceived as useful. Consequently, increasing attribute quantity equally across the choice-set shifts choice toward hedonic options, regardless of whether the attributes are hedonic, utilitarian, or mixed in nature. Consistent with this conceptualization, these effects are amplified under heuristic processing and when usefulness is made salient through priming. The findings have important implications for how marketers present attribute information, for public policy and consumer welfare, and for understanding argument numerosity effects in persuasion more broadly.

How to Make a 29% Increase Look Bigger: The Unit Effect in Option Comparisons

Abstract Quantitative information can appear in different units (e.g., 7-year warranty = 84-month warranty). This article demonstrates that attribute differences appear larger on scales with a higher number of units; expressing quality information on such an expanded scale makes consumers switch to a higher-quality option. Testifying to its practical importance, expressing the energy content of snacks in kilojoules rather than kilocalories increases the choice of a healthy snack. The unit effect occurs because consumers focus on the number rather than the type of units in which information is expressed (numerosity effect). Therefore, reminding consumers of alternative units in which information can be expressed eliminates the unit effect. Finally, the unit effect moderates relative thinking: consumers are more sensitive to relative attribute differences when the attribute is expressed on expanded scales. The relation with anchoring and implications for temporal discounting and loyalty programs are discussed.

On the Perceived Value of Money: The Reference Dependence of Currency Numerosity Effects

Money illusion research shows that the nominal (face) value of money affects consumer perceptions of its real value. Recent mixed findings on consumer valuations in different currencies suggest that the underlying anchoring and adjustment processes are complex. We develop a framework to identify boundary conditions that specify the direction of anchoring effects on valuations in different currencies. Consumers anchor on the numerosity of the nominal difference between prices and salient referents (e.g., budgets) when evaluating transactions. Support for our framework comes from a series of experiments that evoke different reference standards. We discuss implications and opportunities for future research.

Prospect-theory’s Diminishing Sensitivity Versus Economics’ Intrinsic Utility of Money: How the Introduction of the Euro can be Used to Disentangle the Two Empirically

The introduction of the euro gave a unique opportunity to empirically disentangle two components of utility: intrinsic value, a rational component central in economics, and the numerosity effect (going by numbers while ignoring units), a descriptive and irrational component central in prospect theory and underlying the money illusion. We measured relative risk aversion in Belgium before and after the introduction of the euro, and could consider changes in intrinsic value while keeping numbers constant, and changes in numbers while keeping intrinsic value constant. Intrinsic value significantly affected risk aversion, and the numerosity effect did not. Our study is the first to confirm the classical hypothesis of increasing relative risk aversion while avoiding irrational distortions due to the numerosity effect.

Currency Numerosity Effects on the Perceived Value of Transactions

This paper examines the impact of currency numerosity on consumer perceptions of the value of transactions. It extends current theorizing on money illusion in several important ways. We propose a conceptualization that not only considers the nominal prices faced by consumers but, in line with economic and psychophysical theory, also considers the effect of relevant reference standards of evaluation (e.g., a consumer's income or budget). Second, we suggest that consumers rely on the numerosity heuristic in evaluating prices relative to income. Third, we propose and test two alternative computational mechanisms for this evaluation process, the difference between income and prices and the ratio between the two. Our conceptualization not only accounts for recent findings on effects of nominal variations in prices but, in addition, predicts new and reverse effects when both incomes and prices are uniformly rescaled in a new currency. We test our propositions in six experiments. Our research extends current thinking by providing a more parsimonious and comprehensive process explanation for how consumers judge the value of money. We discuss implications of our findings in the context of the introduction of Euro currency on January 1, 2002.