Predicting what we will like: Asking a stranger can be as good as asking a friend

Casey M. Eggleston, Timothy D. Wilson, Minha Lee and Daniel T. Gilbert

Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 2015, vol. 128, issue C, 1-10

Abstract: When predicting how much they will like something they have not encountered before, people use three commonsense theories: It is better to have a description of the attitude object than to know how someone else felt about it (“I know better than others”), better to know how a friend felt about it than how a stranger felt (“birds of a feather”), and better to get advice from friends—how much they think we will like it—than to know how they felt about it (“my friends know me”). We present evidence that people endorse these lay theories but also that they overuse them. Sometimes people make better predictions by knowing how a stranger felt than by getting a description of the object, sometimes a stranger is as good as a friend, and sometimes advice is not any better than knowing how someone else felt.

Keywords: Affective forecasting; Surrogation; Similarity; Relationships; Advice (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0749597815000229
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:jobhdp:v:128:y:2015:i:c:p:1-10

DOI: 10.1016/j.obhdp.2015.03.005

Access Statistics for this article

Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes is currently edited by John M. Schaubroeck

More articles in Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().