Contrast and assimilation effects of processing fluency

When perceptually difficult-to-read information (e.g., a magazine article in difficult font) precedes easy-to-read information about a product, the subjective ease of processing experienced in reading the product's information increases. This change in subjective ease leads to more favorable evaluations of it. Three experiments identify whether this contrast effect on judgment of the second product occurs because evaluations of the content described by the difficult-to-read material are used as a basis for evaluation. Or, if the effect is perceptual in nature and participants are unaware of the influence that fluency of previously encountered information has on subsequent evaluations

Dimensions of holistic thinking: Implications for nonsocial information processing across cultures

Representatives of Asian and Western countries often differ in terms of both their social orientation (e.g., collectivism vs. individualism) and their thinking style (holistic vs. analytic). The disposition to think of oneself in relation to others or to the collective to which one belongs appears similar to a more general holistic thinking style (the disposition to think of elements of a stimulus in relation to one another or their context), suggesting that they may have similar roots. Nevertheless, the low correlations among measures of these characteristics (e.g., Na et al., 2010) indicate that holistic thinking might be multidimensional. To obtain a clearer picture of this multidimensionality, we constructed a procedure that could be used both to assess and to induce three different styles of cognitive processing that reflect different aspects of holistic thinking: specifically, the tendencies (a) to respond to the configuration of a stimulus as a whole without regard to the elements that compose it, (b) to think about stimulus elements in relation to their context, and (c) to think about stimulus elements in relation to one another. Indian, Hong Kong Chinese, North American, and British participants differed in their tendency to use these types of thinking. Moreover, priming these different styles of holistic thinking experimentally affected the performance of only those cognitive tasks that required these thinking styles. Finally, although cultural groups differed spontaneously in their performance of tasks to which different types of holistic thinking were relevant, experimentally inducing these thinking styles eliminated these between-culture differences in performance. Such differences were generally unrelated to measures of social orientation typically used to distinguish representatives of Western and Asian countries

Sometimes it just feels right: The differential weighting of affect-consistent and affect-inconsistent product information

An affect-confirmation process is proposed to explain the conditions in which information that is similar in valence (i.e., evaluatively consistent) with a person’s mood is weighted more heavily in product judgments. Specifically, the affect that participants experience as a result of a transitory mood state may appear to either confirm or disconfirm their reactions to product information, leading them to give this information more or less weight when evaluating the product as a whole. This affective confirmation typically occurs when hedonic criteria are considered more important in evaluation than utilitarian criteria. Four experiments confirmed implications of this conceptualization. The affect that people experience at the time they receive information about an object can influence the manner in which they process this information and, therefore, the judgments that follow. This influence has been detected in both consumer judgment and elsewhere (for reviews, see Clore, Schwarz, and Conway [1994]; Cohen and Aren

How good gets better and bad gets worse: Understanding the impact of affect on evaluations of known brands

Participants experiencing positive or negative affect judged products described by brand and attribute information. Four studies using parameter-estimation and reaction-time procedures determined whether the impact of affect on brand name was the result of its influence on (a) participants ’ perception of its evaluative implications at the time of encoding or (b) the importance they attached to it while integrating it with other information to compute a judgment. Results showed that positive affect increased the extremity of the brand’s evaluative implications (i.e., its scale value) rather than the importance (or weight) that participants attached to it. A fifth experiment demonstrated the implications of these findings for product choices made 24 hours after affect was induced. Research on the role of brand name in product evaluations has been extensive and has addressed a variety of issues, including how brand associations are learned (van Osselaer and Alba 2000; van Osselaer and Janiszewski 2001), its use in relation to other available cues (Maheswaran

The role of affect in perceptions of brand name and price : effects and underlying cognitive mechanisms

Participants who had been induced to feel either happy or not were asked to judge products described by both categorical information (e.g., brand name) and individuating information (e.g., price). These judgments pertained to quality, monetary sacrifice, value, liking and willingness to buy. A parameter estimation procedure was used to isolate the simultaneous effects that affect can have (a) on the importance that participants attached to each piece of information in making judgments, (b) on their perception of its evaluative implications, and (c) as a source of information in its own right. Inducing positive affect at the time product information was received increased the influence of brand name on judgments. This increase was due to the impact of positive affect on not only the importance participants attached to brand name but also their perception of its favorableness. Participants also gave greater importance to brand name when its valence was evaluatively consistent with the affect they were experiencing. Finally, the affect that participants experienced influenced their initial impressions of the product. As expected, the impact of affect was often contingent on the type of information presented and in several cases the type of judgment to be made