The Change You Don’t See Coming: Nonconscious Consequences of Dynamic Transference in Consumer Contexts

Change blindness, the term referring to the phenomenon in which individuals fail to notice even substantial disruptions between an original stimulus and a subsequent altered version of that stimulus, is a well-researched and documented effect (for a review see Simons and Rinsink, 2005). Although the majority of change blindness studies have focused on substantial visual differences, such as adding or removing features to an image or the infamous “invisible gorilla” task in which someone in a gorilla suit walks across a room while others toss a ball in the foreground (Simons and Chabris, 1999), recent research has shown that even gradual changes (e.g., slowly fading an item out of a picture) go undetected by participants (Simons, Franconeri, and Reimer, 2000). Humans, it seems, are often consciously oblivious to change regardless of whether or not the disruption is instant or gradual. However, despite this rich an interesting literature on change blindness, very little research has explored the consequences of change blindness and, to date, only one article has considered consequences of change blindness on consumer behavior (Shapiro and Jespire, 2013). In that study, the researchers found that moving a logo to a different location on an advertisement led to increased preference for the advertisement compared to a control condition in which the logo remained in the same location. Given the ever-increasing demands on consumer attention and the common lay belief of consumers that they can selectively attend to only the marketing messages they want, the purpose of the current research is to explore further consequences of change blindness in consumer contexts, specifically with respect to subjective ratings.