Alignment and involvement in preference construction. Journal of Consumer Psychology Vol.
Consumers often form preferences based on the presented attributes of choice options.
Previous research has suggested that consumers tend to form their preferences using the attributes that are related to common aspects between the options, a.k.a. alignable differences, and ignore attributes that are unique to individual options, a.k.a. nonalignable differences. In three experiments, we suggest that consumers' preference formation can be systematically affected by whether they focus more on alignable differences or more on nonalignable differences of the options, and that this differential focus is a function of consumers' involvement with the task. Specifically, the results show that preference judgment favors alignable differences over nonalignable differences in a low motivation condition. In contrast, high motivation to process information enables consumers to increase their use of nonalignable differences in preference formation, which can result in a preference reversal relative to the low motivation condition. The results suggest that a preference reversal occurs when the nonalignable differences of the target option are superior to both the nonalignable differences and the alignable differences of the reference option.