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Ideas Worth Spreading? Adverse Effects of Information Load in Online Communications

Amir Sepehri, The University of Western Ontario

Abstract

What makes public addresses such as online talks successful vs. not? Across seven field and lab studies, I find that information overload hurts consumer adoption. The cause? Processing disfluency. Information overload makes a message more difficult to process, which in turn reduces liking and interest. The effect disappears among audience members with greater need for cognition, a personality trait marking a penchant for deep and broad information-processing. My empirical investigation concludes by documenting the counter-intuitiveness of the findings (i.e., how consumers mispredict which talks they actually (dis)like). From these results, I derive insights for (i) the psychology of adoption, and (ii) communicators of all creeds wishing to broaden their reach and appeal (e.g., professors, politicians, journalists, scientists, bloggers, podcasters).