Sometimes It Just Feels Right: The Differential Weighting of Affect-Consistent and Affect-Inconsistent Product Information

Abstract

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.

Mood and Comparative Judgment: Does Mood Influence Everything and Finally Nothing?

“…Thus, if affect influences a decision-maker's motivation to engage in cognitive activities (Schwarz and Clore 1996), or if it influences the ability to process information (Eysenck 1982), it may potentially influence the tendency to conduct an attribute-by-attribute comparison. Moreover, if the alternatives' attributes differ in valence, feelings may influence how the attributes are attended to, encoded, and weighted (Adaval 2001;Forgas and Bower 1987) in the course of comparison. In any case, while we expect the existing affect theories in the independent judgment domain to be generalizable to the comparative judgment domain, we also expect to see some distinct influences of affect on comparative judgment that could not be directly extended from the previous research.…”

“…Individuals who are called upon to evaluate an object often use the affect they are experiencing as information about how much they like it (Adaval 2001;Pham 1998;Pham et al 2001;Schwarz 1990;Schwarz and Clore 1983). In some cases, the affect they experience may actually be evoked by the stimulus being judged (Schwarz 2001;Shiv andFedorikhin 1999, 2002;Yeung and Wyer 2005, experiment 1).…”

Affective Influences on Evaluative Processing

“…The incidental affect manipulation, in which participants wrote about either an extremely positive or extremely negative event in their lives, was pretested using a sample of 19 participants. This manipulation has been used extensively and successfully (see Adaval 2003;Murray et al 1990;Schwarz and Clore 1983). After writing the assigned essay, pretest participants completed the PANAS-X scale as in experiment 1.…”

Enjoy! Hedonic Consumption and Compliance with Assertive Messages

“…Specifically, hedonic consumption involves emotional and affective experiences, sensual pleasure, fantasy, and fun (e.g., Adaval 2001;Dhar and Wertenbroch 2000;Kivetz and Simonson 2002) and activates positive mood (e.g., Chaudhuri and Holbrook 2001). Employing this distinction, we propose a process where the usually negative effect of assertive language on compliance may become positive under the moderation of hedonic consumption, because hedonic consumption induces positive mood and as a result communication expectations are changed to more assertive language and the fit between language and expectations elevates compliance.…”