Linking Thought and Behavior: Evidence for Process—Mode of Expression Congruence Effects

Abstract

Prior research suggests that the influence of marketing cues on consumers’ behavior can occur as a result of either system 1 processes (i.e., associative, intuitive, impulsive processes) or system 2 processes (i.e., rule‐based, analytic, reflective processes). We demonstrate that how people express a behavior can influence whether the behavior reflects predominantly system 1 or system 2 processing. Specifically, we propose a process—mode of expression congruence effect, whereby less deliberate behaviors (e.g., physically grabbing something) are relatively more sensitive to system 1 processing, while more deliberate behaviors (e.g., writing down one’s preference) are relatively more sensitive to system 2 processing. Six studies provide support for process—mode of expression congruence, showing that the magnitude and direction in which an environmental cue influences a consumer’s behavior can depend on the deliberateness of the mode of expression.

Why it is good to communicate the bad: understanding the influence of message framing in persuasive communication on consumer decision-making processes

“…Moreover, a dual-process approach is taken, which appears to provide a framework for explaining decision-making in a variety of domains, integrating other theories that try to explain persuasion effects, such as the regulatory focus theory (Higgins, 1997 ; Strack and Deutsch, 2004 ). The reflective-impulsive model addressed here is among the more recent publications about well-known dual-process theories (Epstein, 1994 ; Smith and DeCoster, 2000 ; Lieberman et al, 2002 ; Kahneman, 2003 ) and is most cited among neuroscience-based approaches (Loewenstein and O'Donoghue, 2004 ; Benhabib and Bisin, 2005 ; Botvinick and Cohen, 2014 ), being regularly listed in literature review articles (Gawronski and Creighton, 2013 ; Grayot, 2020 ; Perugini et al, 2021 ) and still being cited in recent publications (Exelmans and Van den Bulck, 2021 ; Li et al, 2021 ; Schoor and Schütz, 2021 ; Nowlan et al, 2022 ).…”