The Ars Technica readership generally prides itself on wanting to know the technical details behind products, and finding these details generally increases the average Ars reader's desire for a product. But not everybody falls into this information-loving category; for some, learning more about a product actually makes them desire it less. Now, researchers have come up with an explanation for these information foes: the added details expose their existing understanding as shallow, which leaves them disappointed.

The authors of the new study posit that the difference between these two types of consumers comes down to their taste for understanding things. There's a commonly used test, called the cognitive reflection test (CRT), that provides a measure of how much mental energy people tend to put into things. It measures this by providing a series of questions with obvious, intuitive answers that are actually wrong. To recognize that your intuitions are leading you astray, you have to stop and take the time to think about your answer a bit. By measuring the frequency with which people pick the intuitive answer, the test provides a measure of their tendency to think carefully.

The authors hypothesized that this desire to think things through would correlate with a consumer's desire for information about a product. Those with a low CRT score wouldn't care much about how a product worked, while those with what they termed a "need for cognition" would put effort into understand what they were buying.

So the authors came up with a number of products and created descriptions for each that varied greatly in their details. In describing a laundry detergent, their descriptions ranged from "Contains natural enzymes" to "The detergent has enzymes. Grains made of alcalase and esperase protein molecules are dissolved in the detergent, thereby making clothes cleaner."

They then recruited participants through Amazon's Mechanical Turk service, and asked them to rate the amount of detail in the explanations, as well as their understanding of the product. Everyone agreed that the authors intent with the different descriptions worked out: the detailed ones provided far more information than the simple ones. But the value of the explanations differed. Those with low cognitive reflection scores felt their understanding was sufficient with the minimalist information—any more and their sense of fluency dropped. Those who scored highly on the CRT showed a linear increase, where more details meant greater understanding.

As it turned out, both groups liked having the sense they understood something. That meant that reflective people enjoyed the more complex explanations, while those for whom thinking things through had a lower appeal ended up preferring the shallow explanation.

In a separate experiment, the authors found that consumers would be willing to pay more for a premium product, but only if the explanation for its premium qualities made sense to them. Again, reflective people were more willing to pay extra if they got a detailed explanation, while the less reflective people liked the simple explanation best. In fact, for the second group, willingness to spring for a premium product dropped as the explanations got more complex.

For their final test, the authors wanted to understand why the less cognitively inclined preferred simple explanations. Is it that they don't force them to think, or that a more complex explanation reveals that they don't really understand things? To find out, they showed the participants a series of actual products and asked them what they'd be willing to pay. Then they asked for a detailed, step-by-step explanation for how the product worked. If a participant had an illusion of understanding, this should shatter it. They were then asked again how much they were willing to pay for it.

For people who scored well on the cognitive reflection test, having to go through the explanation step-by-step didn't change their self-reported level of understanding. But it made them much more willing to pay. The low scorers exhibited a bit of a Dunning-Kruger effect, in that they rated their understanding highly before being asked to explain things, after which it dropped significantly. When their understanding declined, they were much less willing to pay for things.

(The authors tripped themselves up a bit by turning to real products. Some of these had advertising copy that explained how the products acted in terms that nobody could understand, even the more cognitively inclined. It's not clear whether their descriptions were poorly written or the marketers were actually just making things up.)

In any case, the authors conclude that consumers' cognitive tendencies play a strong role in determining how they will respond to advertising. For those with a need to know, the more details, the better (assuming the details make sense, at least). There's an entirely separate population which, if given the details, will end up less likely to purchase a product.

Although the study doesn't extend beyond marketing materials, there seems to be a good chance that these tendencies apply to the availability of information on a product in general. Certainly within the computing scene, there are people who want to build their own machines and compile their own source code, while others are happy to have a black box that just gets the job done.

Journal of Consumer Research, 2012. DOI: 10.1086/667782 (About DOIs).