Does familiarity breed stability? The role of familiarity in moderating the effects of new information on reputation judgments

This paper clarifies how familiarity with an organization moderates the effect of new information on the stability of people's reputation judgments about the organization. Although extant literature suggests the possibility of contrasting predictions, results from two experiments lend support for the hypothesis that familiarity mitigates the impact of both positive and negative information. The paper contributes to a better understanding of the cognitive foundations of reputation stability and to a better understanding of the advantages and disadvantages of being known. (C) 2014 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.