The location in which a product is presented can influence consumers' numerical estimates of product attributes (e.g., price). This effect can be driven by two alternative processes. First, people may have acquired a learned association between numerical magnitude and location as a consequence of frequently viewing larger numbers to the right of smaller ones. In addition, they may have learned a procedure of reading or writing numbers from left to right in increasing order of magnitude. The authors present six experiments that demonstrate the effect of location on numerical estimates and provide evidence that both number–location associations and number–order associations could drive this effect.
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