Consumers Overestimate How Much Others Value Valenced Content

ABSTRACT

Consumers often decide what to share by estimating how much others will value a piece of content. We show that these estimates are systematically miscalibrated for emotionally valenced material. Across four studies spanning controlled tasks and naturalistic contexts, people overestimated others’ valuation of valenced, especially negative, content relative to others’ self‐reports and willingness to pay. Process evidence indicates that valence makes highly affected exemplars salient; focusing on these recipients inflates beliefs about audiences’ valuations, which in turn predicts higher sharing intentions. A lightweight focus‐switching prompt that asks senders to consider a specific close friend reduces this bias to narrow the valenced–neutral sharing gap. These findings recast the spread of valenced content as a judgment bias about what audience value, not reducible to other established drivers of sharing, integrating value‐based sharing with projection biases in consumer judgment. Managerially, interface prompts and audience‐specification defaults can rebalance sharing toward content that audiences actually value, with implications for engagement quality, customer decisions, and consumer welfare.