When Does Feeling of Fluency Matter?

It has been widely documented that fluency (ease of information processing) increases positive evaluation. We proposed and demonstrated in three studies that this was not the case when people construed objects abstractly rather than concretely. Specifically, we found that priming people to think abstractly mitigated the effect of fluency on subsequent evaluative judgments (Studies 1 and 2). However, when feelings such as fluency were understood to be signals of value, fluency increased liking in people primed to think abstractly (Study 3). These results suggest that abstract thinking helps distinguish central decision inputs from less important incidental inputs, whereas concrete thinking does not make such a distinction. Thus, abstract thinking can augment or attenuate fluency effects, depending on whether fluency is considered important or incidental information, respectively.