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 experiments (N = 2,934), we show that consumers are more likely to accept default options when expressing their choice by speaking rather than by clicking. This effect emerges in both incentive-compatible and hypothetical choice settings, and generalizes across narrated and written product descriptions, horizontally and vertically presented options, and option sets of different sizes. We propose and find that speaking heightens perceived time pressure by making the choice feel more immediate, which in turn increases reliance on the default. 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 imposing a brief delay before responding or requiring self-initiated microphone activation. By identifying choice expression modality as a systematic and previously overlooked determinant of default acceptance, this research extends theory on both default 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.

Consumers increasingly seek natural products, yet often lack the expertise and information needed to determine how natural a product is. How, then, do consumers form naturalness judgments when direct evidence is limited? We document a novel “slow = natural” lay belief: consumers perceive products that take longer to produce as more natural. Across one preregistered pilot study, five preregistered experiments, and one Facebook field study, we show that longer production time increases perceived naturalness and, in turn, willingness to pay, product choice, and advertising click-through rates. These effects depend on both the information available to consumers and the goals guiding their consumption. Production time has less influence on naturalness judgments when explicit naturalness information is available, whereas the resulting naturalness inference has a weaker effect on willingness to pay when indulgence-oriented goals make naturalness less prioritized. This research identifies production time as a previously overlooked basis of naturalness judgments and clarifies when this temporal cue shapes consumer valuation and behavior. The findings offer practical guidance for how firms communicate production time and position natural products across categories