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How Do Consumers Transfer Existing Knowledge? A Comparison of Analogy and Categorization Effects
Author(s) -
GreganPaxton Jennifer,
Moreau Page
Publication year - 2003
Publication title -
journal of consumer psychology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 4.433
H-Index - 110
eISSN - 1532-7663
pISSN - 1057-7408
DOI - 10.1207/s15327663jcp1304_09
Subject(s) - analogy , categorization , recall , merge (version control) , psychology , analogical reasoning , cognitive psychology , computer science , natural language processing , artificial intelligence , epistemology , information retrieval , philosophy
The trend in recent consumer research has been to emphasize the similarities between analogy and categorization. In this investigation, we merge the literature on analogy, categorization, and structure mapping theory to reach a better understanding of their differences. In 3 experiments, we compare consumers’ responses to analogy and categorization cues and find that analogy places much greater constraints on knowledge transfer than categorization by focusing consumers on relational similarities. Illustrating this, the analogy group in Study 1 was just as likely as the categorization group to generate relational inferences, but much less likely to generate attribute inferences. Likewise, the results of Study 2 indicate that the analogy group restricted their processing of features lying outside the common relational system, leading to inferior recall relative to the categorization group. Building on these findings, Study 3 demonstrates that, under certain circumstances, analogy and categorization work together syn‐ergistically to enhance consumer memory.