Prior Knowledge and Complacency in New Product Learning

Abstract

Our research examines the role of prior knowledge in learning new product information. Three studies demonstrate that, compared to consumers with lower prior knowledge, those with higher prior knowledge learn less about a new product. Further, higher knowledge consumers are able to learn more but learn less due to motivational deficits; inferior learning of new product information by those with higher prior knowledge is caused by inattention at encoding rather than reconstructive errors at retrieval. These results hold both when prior knowledge is manipulated experimentally (studies 1 and 2) and when it is an individual difference factor (study 3).