Guiding attention toward risk descriptions in brochures of foreign-currency life insurance

Abstract

It is important for consumers to extract risks intrinsically involved in commercial products from advertisement. Insurance Business Act requires advertisements of foreign-currency life insurances to describe risks. However, consumers fail to notice these descriptions due to misdirection of attention and limited cognitive capacity. We investigated whether the emphasis on risk descriptions would enhance attentional capture and improve memory. Young adult participants (Experiments 1 and 2) and middle-aged participants who are promotion target of life insurance participated (Experiment 3). We manipulated the presence or absence of the emphasis on risk description in page headings. Participants studied the brochure and reported the four important items about the insurance. Although both brochures included risk descriptions, participants under the no emphasized heading condition identified less risks as important than those under the emphasized heading condition. In Experiments 2 and 3, participants under the emphasized heading condition identified greater number of risks than those under the no emphasized heading condition in Experiment 1. These results indicated that emphasizing risks as page headings induces attentional capture resulting in successful recall.