From Rumors to Facts, and Facts to Rumors: The Role of Certainty Decay in Consumer Communications

David Dubois (), Derek D. Rucker () and Zakary L. Tormala ()
Additional contact information
David Dubois: GREGH - Groupement de Recherche et d'Etudes en Gestion à HEC - HEC Paris - Ecole des Hautes Etudes Commerciales - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique
Derek D. Rucker: Kellogg [Northwestern] - Kellogg School of Management [Northwestern University, Evanston] - Northwestern University [Evanston]
Zakary L. Tormala: Stanford Graduate School of Business [Stanford]

Post-Print from HAL

Abstract: How does a rumor come to be believed as a fact as it spreads across a chain of consumers? This research proposes that because consumers' certainty about their beliefs (e.g., attitudes, opinions) is less salient than the beliefs themselves, certainty information is more susceptible to being lost in communication. Consistent with this idea, the current studies reveal that though consumers transmit their core beliefs when they communicate with one another, they often fail to transmit their certainty or uncertainty about those beliefs. Thus, a belief originally associated with high uncertainty (certainty) tends to lose this uncertainty (certainty) across communications. The authors demonstrate that increasing the salience of consumers' uncertainty/certainty when communicating or receiving information can improve uncertainty/certainty communication, and they investigate the consequences for rumor management and word-of-mouth communications.

Keywords: word-of-mouth communication; rumor; information transmission; certainty; metacognition (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2011-12
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

Published in Journal of Marketing Research, 2011, 48 (6), pp.1020-1032. ⟨10.1509/jmr.09.0018⟩

There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it.

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:hal:journl:hal-00653241

DOI: 10.1509/jmr.09.0018

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Post-Print from HAL
Bibliographic data for series maintained by CCSD ().