Research

As podcasts and text-to-speech technologies proliferate, consumers increasingly encounter news in spoken rather than written form, which seems likely to exert effects on perceived news credibility. Six preregistered experiments (N = 3,679), using published news articles and accompanying audio available from major media outlets, establish that consumers perceive spoken news as more credible than written news, a hearing-is-believing effect. This effect arises when modality is randomly assigned and when consumers choose their modality; generalizes to news originally created for reading or for listening; and is driven by listening fluency, or the subjective ease of processing spoken relative to written content. Consumers misinterpret ease of processing as a cue of credibility. This fluency decreases in the presence of background noise and content formats that disrupt information processing. Beyond their credibility judgments, consumers also express greater trust in the news source and stronger intentions to act on news delivered in spoken form. These findings contribute to research on modality and fluency, and they highlight pertinent psychological and policy implications of the shift toward spoken news, as facilitated by voice technologies.

Consumers increasingly express choices in digital environments by speaking rather than clicking, yet little is known about how this shift in choice expression modality shapes default acceptance. Across six preregistered studies, we show that consumers are more likely to accept a default option when expressing their choice by speaking rather than by clicking. This effect emerges in both incentive-compatible and product-choice settings and generalizes across visual and auditory presentation modalities. We propose and find that speaking heightens perceived time pressure by making the choice response feel more immediate, which in turn increases reliance on the default as an efficient route to resolving the decision. Consistent with this account, perceived time pressure mediates the effect, and the effect attenuates when interfaces reduce the expectation of immediate response, such as by requiring self-initiated microphone activation or imposing a brief delay before responding. By identifying choice expression modality as a systematic and previously overlooked determinant of default acceptance, this research extends theory on both defaults and modality effects and offers timely implications for the design of voice-enabled consumer interfaces.

Food waste is widely recognized as harmful, yet consumers may not condemn all food waste equally. We propose that moral judgments of food waste depend not only on the harm caused by wasting edible food, but also on the motives observers infer from the act. Across seven experiments, we show that consumers consistently judge wasting vice foods as less immoral than wasting virtue foods, revealing a moral double standard in food waste evaluation. We further demonstrate that this leniency arises because vice food waste elicits stronger inferences of beneficial motive, which increase the perceived justifiability of the act and reduce moral condemnation. Consistent with this account, the effect attenuates among consumers with stronger green consumption values and when the benefits or legitimacy of consuming vice foods are made salient. Finally, we show that this moral leniency has downstream consequences: consumers are less supportive of food waste reduction initiatives when they target vice rather than virtue foods. These findings extend research on vice–virtue distinctions beyond choice and consumption into the domain of waste, and show that moral judgments of environmentally harmful behavior are shaped not only by perceived harm but also by the meaning people attach to the actor’s motives