Heed

You’re thinking of visiting a local restaurant for dinner. You could go online to see what others have said about it, or you could ask your smart speaker to read their reviews to you. Would the choice of medium influence your likelihood of heeding the recommendations?

Across five experiments, researchers found that people were more likely to adhere to recommendations they heard than to follow ones they read, even when the wording was identical. In one of the studies, for example, 1,177 participants received recommendations and chose among three options for each of four products: beer, credit cards, extension cords, and restaurants. Some read a handwritten recommendation for each category, some heard recommendations read by a human, and some heard recommendations read by a computerized voice. Overall, participants who heard a recommendation in either form were more likely to act on it than those who read it were.