Procedural Priming and Consumer Judgments: Effects on the Impact of Positively and Negatively Valenced Information

Abstract

The cognitive procedure that people use to search for information about a product is influenced by the ease with which it comes to mind. Unrelated experiences can activate a search process that governs the order in which favorable and unfavorable product descriptions are identified and the evaluations that are made on the basis of them. Five experiments examined the conditions in which these effects occur. The effects of priming a search strategy on the attention to positively or negatively valenced information are diametrically opposite to the effects of the semantic (e.g., attribute) concepts that are called to mind in the course of activating this strategy.

Assimilation/Contrast, Attention, Information Search/Acquisition, Experimental Design and Analysis (ANOVA)