Elaine Chan

Who they are

This page records the public professional record only. Nothing adverse is recorded and no motive is attributed.

The American Marketing Association's research summary attributes the 2010 paper to the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. Her current position and wider career were not checked for this page.

Key papers

Chan, E., & Sengupta, J. (2010). 'Insincere Flattery Actually Works: A Dual Attitudes Perspective.' Journal of Marketing Research, 47(1), 122-133. doi:10.1509/jmkr.47.1.122.

Read through the American Marketing Association's research summary, not the paper. The study designs, samples and measures were not read.

Key ideas

The paper looks at flattery by marketing agents through the dual attitudes idea, which separates an explicit evaluation from an implicit one. Where the flatterer's ulterior motive is obvious, people discount the compliments, so their explicit evaluation drops. A favourable implicit attitude persists alongside it, and the summary states that the implicit attitude had more influential consequences than the explicit attitude. The authors also examined how the gap between the two attitudes can be reduced; the summary does not explain the mechanism.

The result bears on a puzzle in Cialdini's Influence, where customers and experimental participants who plainly saw the tactic still responded to it. See Dual Attitudes and Persuasion Knowledge.

What the 2010 study asked

Cialdini's Influence describes people who plainly saw a tactic and still responded to it. The book gives accounts and an unnamed experiment, not a test of why. Chan and Sengupta ran one, using the dual attitudes idea that a person can hold two evaluations of the same thing at once. An explicit attitude is the one people state when asked. An implicit attitude is a quicker, gut-level association that they do not state.

The pattern in the results

When the flatterer's ulterior motive was obvious, people discounted the compliments, and their explicit evaluation of the flatterer fell. A favourable implicit attitude persisted alongside it. The authors report that the implicit attitude had more influential consequences than the explicit one. They also examined how the gap between the two attitudes can be reduced, but the summary read for this page does not give the mechanism, and none is stated here.

A worked example

The Tupperware customer in Cialdini's Influence said she hated being invited to the parties, had all the containers she needed, felt she had to go when a friend called, and felt she had to buy something once there. Cialdini comments that such customers “appear to be fully aware of the liking and friendship pressures.” Her account fits the pattern. She can say, truthfully, that she discounts the host's warmth, and still be moved by it. What she reports and what she feels towards the host are two attitudes, and a sales pitch can fail on the first while it works on the second. This is an illustration of the finding and not a result from the study, which used flattery from a marketing agent.

What the result does not say

It does not say that recognising a pitch is useless. It says that a stated judgement is a poor guide to what the pitch did. Whether any training closes the gap between the two attitudes is a separate question that this page does not answer.

What this page leaves out

The study was read through the American Marketing Association's research summary, not the paper. Study designs, samples and measures were not read, so none are described. Nothing here claims that the finding holds beyond the setting the summary describes. Her wider career was not surveyed.

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