Sharing Sensations: Effect on Product Evaluation

Humans, as social beings, are motivated to create a shared reality with others in terms of beliefs, emotions, or inner states. This desire is related to the “saying-is-believing” effect, which occurs when individuals tailor their messages to particular audiences in order to achieve a shared reality. In this working paper, we demonstrate that the saying-is-believing effect plays a role in product evaluation so that consumers tailor their product attitude in the direction of the audience’s opinion. This effect is stronger for less preferred products when no additional information is available. These findings provide important directions for marketing new products in dynamic today’s markets where category ambiguity is very frequent.