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Sentiment analysis has fundamentally changed marketers’ ability to assess consumer opinion. Indeed, the measurement of attitudes via natural language has influenced how marketing is practiced on a day-to-day basis. Yet, recent findings suggest that sentiment analysis’s current emphasis on measuring valence (i.e., positivity or negativity) can produce incomplete, inaccurate, and even misleading insights. Conceptually, the current work challenges sentiment analysis to move beyond valence. We identify the certainty or confidence of consumers’ sentiment as a particularly potent facet to assess. Empirically, we develop a new computational measure of certainty in language – the Certainty Lexicon – and validate its use with sentiment analysis. To construct and validate this measure, we use text from 11.6 million people who generated billions of words, millions of online reviews, and hundreds of thousands of entries in an online prediction market. Across social media datasets, in-lab experiments, and online reviews, we find that the Certainty Lexicon is more comprehensive, generalizable, and accurate in its measurement compared to other tools. We also demonstrate the value of measuring sentiment certainty for marketers: certainty predicted the real-world success of commercials where traditional sentiment analysis did not. The Certainty Lexicon is available at www.CertaintyLexicon.com .

The attraction effect (AE) occurs when the addition of an inferior alternative (i.e., a decoy) to a choice set increases the choice share of the alternative to which it is most similar (i.e., a target), a phenomenon that violates the regularity principle. The AE occurs reliably when the attribute values are represented numerically, but not when the stimuli are perceptual. Such conceptual replication failures indicate a lack of clarity about the mechanisms that produce the AE. The present research develops a framework—the 3A framework—that specifies the distinct functions of ambiguity, accessibility, and applicability in the choice process. These factors, and their attendant mechanisms, explain when and why the AE emerges. They also specify conditions under which the AE is attenuated. Seven main experiments and four supplementary experiments examine when and why the AE emerges with perceptual stimuli, provide support for the 3A framework, and offer insights about how to produce the AE in choice contexts involving perceptual stimuli.