Consumers commonly encounter products with descriptors. Descriptors with meanings understood by consumers clearly affect judgments of the described products. However, can descriptors for which consumers do not know the word’s semantic meaning (as is increasingly common in a globalized world) still affect judgments in systematic ways, via altering the product’s perceived prototypicality? We examine two kinds of judgments that typically move in the same direction, but which we propose are affected by prototypicality in opposite directions: (a) judgments of how expensive the product is and (b) expectations of the subjective quality of the product. Four experiments show that meaningless descriptors lead consumers to assume that a product is a less prototypical version in its category, increasing price judgments but decreasing quality expectations. Altogether, meaningless descriptors lead to more negative attitudes toward products. This research thus sheds light on the impact of encountering descriptor words with unknown meaning, showing that encountering such words does not lead to the typical effects wherein factors that lift price judgments also lift quality expectations.

中文翻译：

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毫无意义的描述符会增加价格判断并降低质量判断

消费者通常会遇到带有描述符的产品。具有消费者所理解含义的描述符显然会影响所描述产品的判断。但是，消费者不知道该词的语义（在全球化的世界中越来越普遍）的描述符是否仍可以通过更改产品的原型来以系统的方式影响判断？我们研究了通常朝着同一方向移动的两种判断，但我们建议这些判断受原型指向相反方向的影响：（a）产品价格的判断和（b）对产品主观质量的期望。四个实验表明，无意义的描述符使消费者认为产品在其类别中不是原型产品，从而增加了价格判断但降低了质量期望。总而言之，无意义的描述符导致对产品的更多负面态度。因此，这项研究揭示了遇到含义不明的描述符词的影响，表明遇到此类词不会导致典型的影响，在这种影响中，抬高价格判断的因素也会抬高质量期望。