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Framing Goals to Influence Personal Savings: The Role of Specificity and Construal Level

In four studies, the authors show that consumers’ savings can be increased or decreased merely by changing the way consumers think about their saving goals. Consumers can (1) either specify or not specify an exact amount to save (goal specificity) and (2) focus on either how to save or why to save (construal level). The results illustrate that specific goals help consumers save more when the saving goal is construed at a high level but that nonspecific goals help consumers save more when the saving goal is construed at a low level. The same pattern of results occurs with anticipated saving success and actual savings. Mediation analyses reveal that for high-level construers, specific (vs. nonspecific) goals lead to success because they are perceived as more important. However, specific (vs. nonspecific) goals are also perceived as more difficult, which is more discouraging for low-level construers.

Personal Relevance and Mental Simulation Amplify the Duration Framing Effect

Different framing of the same duration (one year, 12 months, 365 days) can influence consumers’ impressions of subjective duration, thereby affecting their judgments and decisions. The authors propose that, ironically, self-relevance amplifies this duration framing effect. Consumers for whom a particular self-improvement domain is personally relevant are less likely to adopt a one-year self-improvement plan as compared with a 12-month plan because they perceive it as longer and more difficult. This bias is more likely to manifest in consumers who report that the task is highly personally relevant to them, who are making predictions for themselves (vs. others), and who have high (vs. low) task involvement. Personal relevance amplifies this effect because it prompts process-focused simulation of the plan, consequently increasing susceptibility to spurious duration and difficulty cues embedded in frames.

Judgment Extremity and Accuracy Under Epistemic vs. Aleatory Uncertainty

People view uncertain events as knowable in principle (epistemic uncertainty), as fundamentally random (aleatory uncertainty), or as some mixture of the two. We show that people make more extreme probability judgments (i.e., closer to 0 or 1) for events they view as entailing more epistemic uncertainty and less aleatory uncertainty. We demonstrate this pattern in a domain where there is agreement concerning the balance of evidence (pairings of teams according to their seed in a basketball tournament) but individual differences in the perception of the epistemicness/aleatoriness of that domain (Study 1), across a range of domains that vary in their perceived epistemicness/aleatoriness (Study 2), in a single judgment task for which we only vary the degree of randomness with which events are selected (Study 3), and when we prime participants to see events as more epistemic or aleatory (Study 4). Decomposition of accuracy scores suggests that the greater judgment extremity of more epistemic events can manifes...