Subjective Experience Of Ease Research Articles

Reasoning about privacy in mobile application install decisions: Risk perception and framing

• Users’ risk perception towards mobile privacy can be influenced by the subjective experience of ease or difficulty of bringing privacy concerns or potential risks to mind. • Users are more likely to install a low privacy rated app when generation fluency for privacy concerns is lower due to downgraded risk perception caused by difficult generation experience. • Users consider privacy as part of the app-install decision-making process if privacy information is presented in a simple and salient way. Data sharing has become prevalent with the rapid growth of mobile technologies. A lack of awareness and understanding of privacy practices often results in the installation of privacy-invasive applications (apps) which could potentially put users' personal data at risk. This study aimed to explore how users’ risk perception could be shifted towards more privacy-aware decisions through generation fluency and framing manipulations. It is an online study composed of three components, an experiment and two questionnaires. We manipulated the availability of privacy worries, by asking participants to generate either 2 or 10 privacy worries. Generating 10 worries was experienced as difficult, whereas generating 2 was easy. The difficult experience led to downgraded perception of risk, and consequently increased likelihood of installing a low privacy rated fictional app. Therefore, we suggest that improving generation fluency of privacy concerns could encourage users’ adoption of a more conservative judgment strategy when installing an app, safeguarding them against privacy-invasive apps.

Personalizing the Customization Experience: A Matching Theory of Mass Customization Interfaces and Cultural Information Processing

Mass customization interfaces typically guide consumers through the configuration process in a sequential manner, focusing on one product attribute after the other. What if this standardized customization experience were personalized for consumers on the basis of how they process information? A series of large-scale field and experimental studies, conducted with Western and Eastern consumers, shows that matching the interface to consumers’ culture-specific processing style enhances the effectiveness of mass customization. Specifically, presenting the same information isolated (by attribute) to Western consumers but contextualized (by alternative) to Eastern consumers increases satisfaction with and likelihood of purchasing the configured product, along with the amount of money spent on the product. These positive consumer responses emerge because of an increase in “interface fluency”—consumers’ subjective experience of ease when using the interface. The authors advise firms to personalize the customization experience by employing processing-congruent interfaces across consumer markets.

Processing fluency scale development for consumer research

Processing fluency or the subjective experience of ease that consumers can experience when processing information is a prominent construct in consumer research. Despite its prevalence, however, its measurement has been inconsistent. The present research addresses this methodological gap in literature by developing and testing a scale for assessing the subjective experience of processing fluency. This scale demonstrates strong evidence of convergent and discriminant validity, reliability, and nomological validity across different processing fluency manipulations and marketing contexts. Use of this scale will allow marketing practitioners and academicians to consistently measure a psychological state that is known to have ubiquitous effects on downstream consumer outcomes including trust, attitude, and choice. Researchers can administer this four-item scale by having participants indicate their agreement (1 = strongly disagree, 7 = strongly agree) on whether a given marketing communication (e.g., ad copy) is (a) difficult to process, (b) difficult to read, (c) takes a long time to process, and (d) difficult to understand.

DOES PRODUCT CONTEXT COMPLEXITY MATTER IN (IN)CONGRUENT SHOP ENVIRONMENTS? THE INFLUENCE OF PROCESSING FLUENCY ON PRODUCT EVALUATION

DOES PRODUCT CONTEXT COMPLEXITY MATTER IN (IN)CONGRUENT SHOP ENVIRONMENTS? THE INFLUENCE OF PROCESSING FLUENCY ON PRODUCT EVALUATION

Designing persuasive health materials using processing fluency: a literature review

BackgroundHealth materials to promote health behaviors should be readable and generate favorable evaluations of the message. Processing fluency (the subjective experience of ease with which people process information) has been increasingly studied over the past decade. In this review, we explore effects and instantiations of processing fluency and discuss the implications for designing effective health materials. We searched seven online databases using “processing fluency” as the key word. In addition, we gathered relevant publications using reference snowballing. We included published records that were written in English and applicable to the design of health materials.ResultsWe found 40 articles that were appropriate for inclusion. Various instantiations of fluency have a uniform effect on human judgment: fluently processed stimuli generate positive judgments (e.g., liking, confidence). Processing fluency is used to predict the effort needed for a given task; accordingly, it has an impact on willingness to undertake the task. Physical perceptual, lexical, syntactic, phonological, retrieval, and imagery fluency were found to be particularly relevant to the design of health materials.ConclusionsHealth-care professionals should consider the use of a perceptually fluent design, plain language, numeracy with an appropriate degree of precision, a limited number of key points, and concrete descriptions that make recipients imagine healthy behavior. Such fluently processed materials that are easy to read and understand have enhanced perspicuity and persuasiveness.

Affect intensity and processing fluency of deterrents

The theory of emotional intensity (Brehm, 1999) suggests that the intensity of affective states depends on the magnitude of their current deterrents. Our study investigated the role that fluency—the subjective experience of ease of information processing—plays in the emotional intensity modulations as reactions to deterrents. Following an induction phase of good mood, we manipulated both the magnitude of deterrents (using sets of photographs with pre-tested potential to instigate an emotion incompatible with the pre-existent affective state—pity) and their processing fluency (normal vs. enhanced through subliminal priming). Current affective state and perception of deterrents were then measured. In the normal processing conditions, the results revealed the cubic effect predicted by the emotional intensity theory, with the initial affective state being replaced by the one appropriate to the deterrent only in participants exposed to the high magnitude deterrence. In the enhanced fluency conditions the emotional intensity pattern was drastically altered; also, the replacement of the initial affective state occurred at a lower level of deterrence magnitude (moderate instead of high), suggesting the strengthening of deterrence emotional impact by enhanced fluency.

Uniting the Tribes of Fluency to Form a Metacognitive Nation

Processing fluency, or the subjective experience of ease with which people process information, reliably influences people’s judgments across a broad range of social dimensions. Experimenters have manipulated processing fluency using a vast array of techniques, which, despite their diversity, produce remarkably similar judgmental consequences. For example, people similarly judge stimuli that are semantically primed (conceptual fluency), visually clear (perceptual fluency), and phonologically simple (linguistic fluency) as more true than their less fluent counterparts. The authors offer the first comprehensive review of such mechanisms and their implications for judgment and decision making. Because every cognition falls along a continuum from effortless to demanding and generates a corresponding fluency experience, the authors argue that fluency is a ubiquitous metacognitive cue in reasoning and social judgment.

Ease of retrieval as a source of information in social change judgments

Several authors have proposed two alternative sources of information in memory based judgments: the contents retrieved from memory and the ease with which the retrieval process is perceived. Schwarz and colleagues have made it clear that, in certain circumstances, people base their judgments on the subjective experience of ease with which the information is retrieved. The present work studies the extent to which the use of this heuristic could be generalized to judgments of social change (Study 1) and some of the factors that can affect the ability to diagnose the ease of retrieval as a source of information (Study 2). The results obtained confirm the ability to generalize this heuristic to judgments of social change and to establish some conditions that affect the diagnostic- city of this source of information.

Exploring “fringe” consciousness: The subjective experience of perceptual fluency and its objective bases

Perceptual fluency is the subjective experience of ease with which an incoming stimulus is processed. Although perceptual fluency is assessed by speed of processing, it remains unclear how objective speed is related to subjective experiences of fluency. We present evidence that speed at different stages of the perceptual process contributes to perceptual fluency. In an experiment, figure-ground contrast influenced detection of briefly presented words, but not their identification at longer exposure durations. Conversely, font in which the word was written influenced identification, but not detection. Both contrast and font influenced subjective fluency. These findings suggest that speed of processing at different stages condensed into a unified subjective experience of perceptual fluency.