The Multiple Routes of Affective Influences on Consumer Behavior

SESSION OVERVIEW Research on emotion has suggested that the influence of affect on behavior can occur through multiple routes, ranging from the rather quick and automatic “low road” that bypasses any cognitive processes, to the more fine-tuned “high road” that allows for systematic cognitive processes (LeDoux 1996). Indeed, empirical research has shown that affective reactions can occur automatically and rapidly, and exert a direct influence on judgment (e.g., Murphy and Zajonc 1993) and consumption behavior (Winkielman and Berridge 2004), which is independent of cognition. Affect can also indirectly influence consumer behavior by changing people’s cognitive processes. That is, people’s affective states can alter their perceptions or beliefs about the target (Pham 2004) or activate affect-consistent information in memory, which in turn impact people’s behavior (Isen, Shalker, Clark, and Karp 1978). More recently, it has also been suggested the influence of affect on consumer behavior can also take a high road by going through a metacognitive process before exerting its influence. In this case, the reliance on affect in judgments and decisions is subject to the scrutiny of cognitive processes in which people assess whether or how they should use their feelings in a given judgment or decision (Avnet and Pham 2004; Pham 2004). This session takes a closer look at the multiple routes of affective influences on consumer behavior by bringing together research that examines the role of affect in consumers’ judgment of novel objects, their ability to detect changes, and their financial decision making. The first paper by Hong, Lee, and Li examines the low road of affective influences through which precognitive affective processes directly impact consumer judgment. Building on the valence hypothesis of emotional processing (Silberman and Weingartner, 1986), which postulates that the left hemisphere is specialized for processing positive emotional stimuli and the right hemisphere is specialized for processing negative emotional stimuli, this research examines how emotional lateralization processing impacts judgment. Using a paradigm where affective primes are presented subliminally in participants’ right or left visual field, the author showed in three experiments that participants’ judgment of a target is more favorable when the valence of the prime is positioned to match the efficient processing of the hemisphere (i.e., negative primes in the left visual field and positive primes in the right visual field); that is, the matching effect is observed even when the prime is negatively valenced. These results differ from the classic affective priming effects (Murphy and Zajonc 1993) whereby participants’ judgment of the target assimilates toward the valence of the prime (i.e., positive prime leads to more positive judgment, whereas negative prime leads to more negative judgment). The second paper by Rucker and Labroo explores the indirect influences of affect on consumers’ ability to detect perceptual changes by way of changing people’s cognitive processes. Specifically, they show that mood-congruent cognitions may interfere with the accurate storage and retrieval of a stimulus representation from memory. Consequently, people are more accurate in detecting change in emotion-incongruent (vs. emotion-congruent) objects. That is, happy respondents are less accurate in detecting change in a positive (vs. negative) object, and unhappy respondents are less accurate in detecting change in a negative (vs. positive) object. Interestingly, the effect is not hardwired: simply imagining a neutral product (e.g., beer) with positive or negative associations leads to similar effects. Finally, the third paper by Stephen and Pham investigates a case where affect influences consumer behavior through a high road. Specifically, using an ease-of-retrieval paradigm, they manipulated whether people would trust their feelings in a classic behavioral economics game called the ultimatum game. Results from five experiments show that, compared to lower trust in one’s feelings, higher trust in one’s feelings results in less generous offers in ultimatum games, especially in the dictator version of the game. Higher trust in one’s feelings also results in greater rejection of unfair offers, with little effect on the acceptance rates of fair offers. These findings are not driven by differences in perceptions of what players see as “fair” divisions under high versus low trust of feelings. Rather, players with high trust in their feelings appear to be playing the game as if they represented it in a more literal fashion. The session highlights a topic that has generated considerable interest in consumer research over the last two decades. We expect this session to be well attended by members of ACR who are interested in the areas of affect and emotion, as well as in consumer decision making and information processing. The session will end with a discussion led by one of the experts in the area, Mary Frances Luce, on how affect can impact consumer behavior, judgment and decision making. We hope the session will provoke discussion on how to systematically integrate the findings relating to these three types of emotion-judgment into a unified framework.