MODERATING EFFECTS OF PRIOR KNOWLEDGE ON THE PERCEIVED DIAGNOSTICITY OF BELIEFS DERIVED FROM IMPLICIT VERSUS EXPLICIT PRODUCT CLAIMS

An experiment was conducted to examine the effects of prior knowledge on the perceived diagnosticity of beliefs derived from directly stated versus implied product claims. Subjects were exposed to sets of argum ents implying several conclusions about specific product benefits. The se conclusions were either stated directly in the text (explicit concl usions) or omitted (implicit conclusions). Degree of belief in the tar get conclusions and the perceived diagnosticity of these beliefs was a ssessed by computing Bayesian likelihood ratios on the basis of subjec ts' component probability estimates. As predicted, low knowledge subje cts perceived their beliefs to be more diagnostic when they were based on explicit (versus implicit) conclusions. By contrast, high knowledg e subjects perceived their beliefs as diagnostic across conditions. Im plications of the results for understanding the role of consumer infer ence processes in advertising are discussed.