Shared Values, Trust, and Consumers’ Deference to Experts

Consumers develop expertise in some areas (Alba and Hutchinson 1987), but are necessarily ignorant in others and must defer to experts. Deference creates a trust problem because others often have their own agenda (Sperber et al. 2010), particularly in economic contexts where money is on the line, as well as a problem of consensus because experts frequently disagree. Although advice-taking and attitude change have been carefully studied in other contexts (Bonaccio and Dalal 2006; Fleming and Petty 2000), little work has examined a potentially key determinant of consumers’ deference to expert advice: The alignment between the consumer’s and expert’s cultural–ideological values. Although values influence risk assessments in domains such as climate change (Kahan et al. 2010), little is known about how experts’ values influence deference in less political contexts, such as consumer choices. We hypothesized that consumers would use shared values as a cue to the broader quality of the expert’s judgment (and perhaps their trustworthiness as well). Further, we hypothesized that this effect would be exacerbated among consumers who subscribe to objectivist theories of moral truth (Goodwin and Darley 2008), since this view would imply that ideologically aligned experts have superior access to fundamental truths.