The Granularity Effects: Numerical Judgment from a Social Perspective.

Abstract

In marketplace, information is communicated to consumers by marketers. Accordingly, judgments and decisions made in response to this information ought to be considered in their communicative context. Research in quantitative judgment typically fails to do so; it analyzes judgment and decision making in a social vacuum, essentially pretending that the quantitative information simply exists and comes from nowhere. In contrast, my research places quantitative judgment in its conversational context by investigating how people make inferences from the expression of a quantity. The theoretical basis of this research is built on Grice’s (1975) logic of conversation, which suggests that information recipients interpret a piece of communication based on the assumption that the speaker provides as much information as is relevant while remaining truthful. A series of three essays addresses this issue. In the first essay, I study how consumers draw inferences from a time estimate expressed at different levels of granularity. Consumers consider estimates expressed in finer granularity more precise and have more confidence in their accuracy. Hence, they perceive products as more likely to deliver on their promises when the promise is described in fine grained rather than coarse units. In the second essay, I find that precise numbers have a stronger influence on subsequent estimates than round numbers, in the way that people make small adjustment from the anchor when the anchor is a precise (vs. round) number. In the third essay, I argue that pragmatic inference is situated in the judgment task, so that the influence of numerical expression can go beyond quantitative judgment. In judgments of product value, precise statements of volume on a package give rise to the inference that the product is particularly valuable. Importantly, all these effects are eliminated when consumers doubt that the communicator complies with Gricean norms of cooperative conversational conduct. My dissertation concludes that there is more to “numeric cognition” than mere numbers – the numbers are communicated and we cannot fully understand their influence without taking communicative processes into account. It highlights the role of pragmatic inferences in consumer judgment and suggests important implications for the design of marketing communications.