Why It Is So Hard to Predict Our Partner's Product Preferences: The Effect of Target Familiarity on Prediction Accuracy

Many buying decisions require predictions of another person's product attitudes. Yet, consumers are often inaccurate predictors, even for familiar others. We provide strong evidence that target familiarity can even hurt accuracy in the presence of attitude feedback. Although overprojection and lack of product-specific attitude information have been identified as possible reasons for prediction inaccuracy, our results suggest a retrieval explanation. When presented with product-specific attitude feedback, predictors adapted their level of projection and encoded the attitude information, but they did not use this information. Instead, they retrieved less diagnostic, pre-stored information about the familiar targets to predict their product attitudes. (c) 2006 by JOURNAL OF CONSUMER RESEARCH, Inc..