Adolescent Reasoning about Advertisements: Relevance of Product Claims

Abstract

To foster generalization of science education from the classroom to other important problems we investigate how adolescents reason about scientific claims in advertisements. We administered interviews to 88 seventh and eighth graders to assess their criteria for brand decision making and to determine whether they use these criteria when assessing claims in advertisements. We found that adolescents change their product criteria frequently, that they lose track of their own criteria when confronted with advertisers' claims and that advertisements may encourage adolescents to add criteria to those they consider when making brand decision. Implications include the potential for impaired decision making due to an information overload and the possibility that adolescents may adopt social-psychological criteria which when not fulfilled could lead to loss of self-esteem.