When and why a large audience non-normatively inflates the perceived competence of actors

Information about audience size (e.g., the number of on-site attendees at a match) is ubiquitous in the marketplace. Audience size is often diagnostic of an actor's competence. However, it remains unclear how audience size influences the perceived competence of an actor when it results from incidental factors (e.g., a pandemic) and is thus not diagnostic of performance. This research identifies the mere audience-size effect that when knowing the audience size is incidentally determined, consumers still perceive the actor observed by a large (vs. small) audience as more competent. We propose that the mere audience-size effect is due to an overgeneralization of the “large audience = competent actor” heuristic. Across four studies (N = 1,161), we asked participants to rate the competence of an actor with an incidentally large audience or an actor with an incidentally small audience. Studies 1 and 2 identified that when audience size resulted from weather or a pandemic and thus not diagnostic of performance, observers, actors, and audience all perceived the actor with an incidental large (vs. small) audience size as more competent and believed she deserved a higher salary. Therefore, the mere audience-size effect was robust and led to downstream consequences. Study 3 compared how participants were influenced by diagnostic and non-diagnostic audience size. Results revealed that consumers relied less on non-diagnostic (vs. diagnostic) audience size but were still influenced by it. Therefore, the mere audience-size effect was due to insufficiently resisting the “large audience = competent actor” heuristic. Study 4 showed that the mere audience-size effect was attenuated when consumers were prompted to deliberate on the determinants of audience size. This study identifies a novel type of overgeneralization and alerts consumers to rely on audience size to infer an actor's competence with caution.