The Impact of Retrieval Difficulty on Satiation

Satiation plays an important role in consumption. Over the time, an individual will eventually get fed up by product with which he or she has been satisfied before. Our work has a psychological view of satiation, which is based on the premise that satiation is not determined by past consumptions but is constructed. Our work focuses on the cognitive process of preferences construction including the inferences about fluency of retrieval. We showed that in this case of difficulty of retrieval, the consumer can effectively infer that he or she has not consumed a particular product a lot. This perception of reduced past consumptions will consequently make the consumer have less feeling of satiation. We conducted an empirical study among 166 students who had responded to our online survey regarding different soft drinks in Peru. Participants who remembered the last three times they have consumed their favorite drink expressed more desire to consume the drink again than those who only remembered their last consumption. Moreover, individuals who were informed that the recall task is difficult had no relevant effect on their desire.