Marketing Social Responsibility: An Empirical Investigation of the Relationship between Domain Familiarity and Consumers' Perceived Self Knowledge of Recycling Information

This research blends a current social marketing issue, recycling, with two independently established psychological literature streams, i.e., feeling-of-knowing and domain familiarity. Feeling-of-knowing judgments subjectively predict future memory performance on previously non-recalled items. The feeling-of-knowing theory is used as a foundation on which to investigate consumers' perceived self-knowledge of factual recycling information. Further, this research introduces domain familiarity as an influencing force which may inhibit the accuracy of self-stated feeling-of-knowing. Domain familiarity implies a general familiarity with the recycling topic. It is the accessibility to the general topic but lack of particular factual information which is suggested to contribute to an inaccurate feeling-of-knowing. Domain familiarity is comprised of two components, experience and knowledge. Subjects which were found to possess relatively high levels of knowledge were more likely to state their feeling-of-knowing with some accuracy. Conversely, subjects which possessed relatively high levels of experience did not evidence an accurate feeling-of-knowing. Further, recycling behavior was not found to differ significantly between the 'knowledge' and 'experience' subjects. A group of undergraduate students participated in an experiment which measured domain familiarity, feeling-of-knowing and recycling behavior. Overall, a lack of feeling-of-knowing accuracy was found to reflect an artifically inflated self-perception of recycling knowledge. These findings are discussed in terms of marketing implications and future research ideas.