Journal of Consumer Psychology

Consistent with calls for a dynamical social psychology (Jacoby et al., 1987; Nowak, Lewenstein, & Vallacher, 1994), attitude formation was studied using a recently developed, computer‐based simulation technique termed Higher Order Cognitive Tracing (see Jacoby et al., 1994). Participants’ attitudes toward 12 different products in 3 product categories were investigated as a function of incremental information input. As opposed to traditional memory‐based models of attitude formation, the study explored online processing models. Results indicate that the impact of information tends to decrease the later in the sequence that information is accessed. In addition, new information that is affectively inconsistent with prior information tends to have a greater impact on attitudes than information that is affectively redundant. This effect is more pronounced earlier rather than later in the sequence of information acquisition. Implications and suggestions for future research are discussed.

Many consumer products today present information regarding an environmental attribute (e.g., recycled content). This information can be expected to augment the other attributes, resulting in an overall increased interest in the product. However, previous research on preferences for environmental policies (e.g., an increase in air quality) suggests that environmental values are prone to anomalies. For example, respondents may refuse to provide a value or they may exhibit embedding effects, which means they may value two or more environmental goods less highly together than separately. Anomalies such as embedding violate commonsense assumptions regarding an attribute's contribution to the overall attractiveness of a product. These studies examined whether such anomalies obtain in the valuation of consumer goods with environmental attributes in different elicitation conditions. Study 1 established this anomaly for environmental attributes, in which the values were measured using pricing responses (i.e., “how much would you be willing to pay?”) for trades among consumer goods. Study 2 provided a controlled measurement (via a conjoint method) of the trade‐offs between the environmental and nonenvironmental attributes and established the effect under this elicitation method. Study 3 extended the findings to conjoint tasks with pricing responses and explored the psychological mediators of embedding, including the role of moral involvement. Study 4 concentrated on possible inferential underpinnings of the effect and further established that the emotional and moral content of environmental attributes contributes to their susceptibility to anomalous valuation.

This commentary discusses the role that naive theories play in consumer judgment. It emphasizes deviation from expectations as a driver of metacognitive activity and discusses challenges involved in transposing Schwarz's (2004) elegant framework to the domain of consumer choice. The author concludes that the value of the metacognitive framework is limited when applied to choices, especially those for which subjective experience effects are driven by affect or emotions.

In this research, we tested the effects of chronic and temporary sources of accessibility on impression formation. Although some research suggests that chronicity amplifies temporary effects because of greater susceptibility to external primes, other research suggests that chronicity masks temporary effects because of redundance. We demonstrate in a thought listing study that in the domain of gender stereotypes, trait stereotypes may be routinely applied by those with a medium or high tendency to stereotype women, making external primes redundant. Based on this redundancy, we proposed that gender stereotypical primes will have little influence on subsequent judgments of those with a medium or high tendency to gender stereotype. In contrast, gender stereotypical primes will result in the classic assimilation effect for those with a low tendency to gender stereotype. We tested these propositions in the domain of female role portrayals in advertising and examined the effect of advertisements that feature women as homemakers (vs. do not feature women) on trait judgments of a target woman whose behaviors are ambiguously described. Results from 2 experiments show that, as predicted by the redundancy hypothesis, judgments of medium and high tendency to stereotype participants are not affected by advertisements portraying homemakers. Also as expected, judgments of low tendency to stereotype participants are assimilated to the homemaker prime. These results hold across tendency to trait stereotype (Experiment 1) and tendency to role stereotype (Experiment 2) and for trait judgments as well as gift choice. Theoretical and practical implications of these findings are discussed.