title: Detecting and reacting to change: the effect of exposure to narrow categorizations.
abstract: The ability to detect a change, to accurately assess the magnitude of the change, and to react to that change in a commensurate fashion are of critical importance in many decision domains. Thus, it is important to understand the factors that systematically affect people's reactions to change. In this article we document a novel effect: decision makers' reactions to a change (e.g., a visual change, a technology change) were systematically affected by the type of categorizations they encountered in an unrelated prior task (e.g., the response categories associated with a survey question). We found that prior exposure to narrow, as opposed to broad, categorizations improved decision makers' ability to detect change and led to stronger reactions to a given change. These differential reactions occurred because the prior categorizations, even though unrelated, altered the extent to which the subsequently presented change was perceived as either a relatively large change or a relatively small one.
authors.affiliation: Department of Marketing, Stern School of Business, 40 West 4th Street, New York University, New York, NY 10012, USA. achakrav@stern.nyu.edu
authors.forename: Amitav
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Chakravarti
authors.forename: Christina
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Fang
authors.forename: Zur
authors.initials: Z
authors.lastname: Shapira
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D001288:Attention / Q000502:physiology*; D002965:Classification; D032882:Comprehension / Q000502:physiology*; D003657:Decision Making / Q000502:physiology*; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D010775:Photic Stimulation; D011930:Reaction Time; D017603:Signal Detection, Psychological / Q000502:physiology*; D055815:Young Adult