How Do We Know Consumers Don't Read Small Print?

Everybody "knows" consumers don't read fine print.  But the empirical evidence I've found to support this claim is surprisingly sparse.  Here's what I've come across:  From my article, "Towards a New Model of Consumer Protection: The Problem of Inflated Transaction Costs, 47 Wm. & Mary L. Rev. 1635, 1659-60 (2006):

When PC Pitstop, a marketer of anti-spyware services, surveyed 7260 computer users with Gator or GAIN (Gator Advertising Information Network) applications installed on their computers, it found that 74.2% did not recall installing Gator or a GAIN application; 14.9% had not read the license agreement; 8.5% had read the license agreement for no more than five minutes; and fewer than 3% had spent more than five minutes reading the license agreement, a document that PC Pitstop estimated would take the average reader at least twenty minutes to read

Footnote 84 cites  PC Pitstop, Survey Says: Gator Users Didn’t Know, http://www.pcpitstop.com/gator/Survey.asp.

That's better than nothing, but I'm not sure how reliable it is, since it's based on memory, and applies to end user license agreements, rather than fine print in a written contract.

Years ago, I ran across an account of an experiment which I later referred to in a letter published in the New York Times on July 17, 1997 in the following words (but not the formatting, which on my computer looks like blank verse for some reason--the closest I'll ever come to writing poetry): "

    Some years ago a bank mailed its depositors a brochure explaining their
    obligations in electronic transfers. Included in 100 of the brochures
    was a statement that the bank would pay $10 to depositors who sent in
    their name and address on a piece of paper with the word ''regulation.''
    Not one person did.

I can't remember anything about the source of that report except that it appeared in a commercial transactions casebook.  But again, it's not dispositive, because depositors may not have believed the statement or may have felt it wasn't worth it to write in to collect $10 (just as consumers often don't bother to collect rebates). 

Then there's evidence from which one can infer that consumers haven't read fine print when they had the opportunity, like Chris Hoofnagle's and Jennifer King's paper, "What Californians Understand About Privacy Online,"  which indicates that many Californians don't know the contents of privacy policies.  The problem is that that ignorance could be because the survey respondents didn't read the policies, didn't understand them, didn't retain the information, or for some other reason.

Anybody know of any other empirical evidence to show that consumers do or don't read fine print?

Comments

[Think Money]

Perhaps the amount of people in debt & the state of the economy is also evidence of this! So many people may have signed on the dotted line unaware of exactly what they were getting themselves in for. I would imagine many of them would have thought twice had they read the small print...