Davy Lerouge

Evaluating the Benefits of Distraction on Product Evaluations: The Mind-Set Effect

Past research in consumer behavior typically assumes that distraction during the decision process needs to be avoided. However, a common piece of advice given to consumers who have to make complex decisions is to distract their attention away from the decision problem for some moments. The current research shows that distraction can indeed help consumers to differentiate attractive from unattractive products. Yet this occurs only for consumers with a configural mind-set who tend to form coherent representations of products in their memory. For consumers with a featural mind-set, who typically hold mixed product representations, distraction does not affect product evaluations. This implies that it is the specific processing mind-set of consumers that determines whether distraction leads to more product differentiation or not.

Why it is so Hard to Predict Our Partner's Product Preferences: The Effect of Target Familiarity on Prediction Accuracy

PCT No. PCT/JP90/01104 Sec. 371 Date Apr. 4, 1991 Sec. 102(e) Date Apr. 4, 1991 PCT Filed Aug. 30, 1990 PCT Pub. No. WO91/03810 PCT Pub. Date Mar. 21, 1991.A magnetic recording medium having a magnetic layer on at least one side of a base film which is a stretched film of styrene polymer having a high degree of syndiotactic configuration or a composition thereof or a laminate film containing the stretched film, wherein linear expansion coefficient is not more than 5x10-5/ DEG C. and static friction coefficient is not less than 0.3 and not more than 1.0 is disclosed. The magnetic recording medium has good sliding properties, smoothness, heat resistance and moisture resistance, is excellent in dimensional stability to temperature and moisture, and has good coersive force, thus can be highly densified.

Mood and Context-Dependence: Positive Mood Increases and Negative Mood Decreases the Effects of Context on Perception

Five studies show that mood affects context-dependence, such that negative mood promotes attention to a salient target, whereas positive mood enhances attention to both target and context. Judgments of temperature (Study 1), weight (Study 2), and size (Studies 3 and 4) were more strongly affected by the context in a positive than in a negative mood. Moreover, these effects extend to the social domain: When perceiving a target persons emotions, happy people were more influenced by the context than were sad people (Study 5). Thus, positive mood enhanced, and negative mood reduced, the magnitude of perceptual context effects. The results suggest that this pattern is not easily explained in terms of effort or depth of processing differences.

The Influence of Mood on Attribution

Four studies show that mood systematically affects attributions of observed behavior by altering relative attention to actor and context. When the actor is more salient, sad people are more inclined to perceive an actor in stable trait terms and favor dispositional over situational explanations, whereas the opposite is true for happy people (Studies 1-3). However, when the context is made more salient, this pattern reverses, such that those in a negative mood make more situational attributions than those in a positive mood (Study 4). Taken together, these findings provide strong support for our hypothesis that mood and salience interact to affect attributions.

The Impact of Subtle Environmental Cues on Product Attitude Predictions

For many product decisions, consumers predict the product attitudes of other persons. These predictions are typically made in retailing environments consisting of many cues that passively activate mental concepts. We investigate if and how these externally activate concepts influence attitude predictions. Depending on the activated concept, we distinguish two possible processes that might bias the predictions: retrieval and comparison. In study 1 and 2, subtle primed trait concepts are found to elicit a process that selectively retrieves trait congruent prediction cues, ultimately leading to assimilation effects. When extreme exemplars are externally activated, like in study 3, comparison processes are observed, resulting in a contrast effect on the attitude predictions.