Although advertising persuades through overt appeals to reason or emotion, we focus on the indirect process by which advertising influences the interpretation of objective product evidence. We investigate how two factors moderate advertising-evidence interactions: the ambiguity of the evidence...

Against common intuition, we find that variety in an assortment reduces its perceived quantity. Two studies show that people provide larger quantity estimates when shown random patterns of identical colored dots or geometric shapes than when those patterns contain variety. The difference in...