EXPRESS: The Enjoy-Able Effect: Consumer Enjoyment Inflates Self-Evaluations of Ability

This research establishes the enjoy-able effect . Enjoyment (whether experienced, anticipated, or relative) increases consumers’ self-evaluated ability, leading them to act more like self-perceived experts (e.g., choose more expert-targeted products) and exhibit better-than-average biases for more enjoyable activities. Two waves of archival data (Ns = 559,370 and 491,791), normed associations across 100 consumer activities (N = 397), and six experiments (Ns = 251–593) document these outcomes of consumer enjoyment, establish that they operate independently of actual ability, and provide evidence that consumers’ inferences about their ability are driven by their overgeneralization of a lay theory about the relationship between enjoyment and expertise. The enjoy-able effect therefore depends on the diagnosticity of enjoyment as an input to subjective expertise, relative to other accessible inputs. Accordingly, this work highlights when and for whom other accessible inputs (e.g., an alternate lay theory associating effort and expertise) reduce reliance on the “enjoyment = expertise” lay theory. Overall, this research documents a previously unrecognized influence of enjoyment on consumer behavior, offers new insights on classic theories (e.g., flow and self-determination theory), and identifies a new and robust antecedent to subjective expertise. Managerial implications for product development and promotion, consumer targeting, and gamification are discussed.