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Assimilation or Contrast?: Comparison Relevance, Distinctness, and the Impact of Accessible Information on Consumer Judgments
Author(s) -
Stapel Diederik A.,
Koomen Willem,
Velthuijsen Aart S.
Publication year - 1998
Publication title -
journal of consumer psychology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 4.433
H-Index - 110
eISSN - 1532-7663
pISSN - 1057-7408
DOI - 10.1207/s15327663jcp0701_01
Subject(s) - psychology , relevance (law) , contrast (vision) , context (archaeology) , meaning (existential) , cognitive psychology , interpretation (philosophy) , social psychology , linguistics , computer science , artificial intelligence , political science , paleontology , philosophy , law , psychotherapist , biology
In 3 studies we demonstrate that the direction of context or information accessibility effects on consumer judgments is dependent on the comparison relevance and distinctness of the activated information. Accessible information yields contrastive judgment effects (that occur in both judgments of “new” and “familiar” stimuli) when the activated information is sufficiently distinct and comparison relevant to be used as a scale anchor, whereas it yields assimilative interpretation effects (that only occur in judgments of new stimuli of which the meaning is ambiguous) when the activated information is relatively indistinct and comparison irrelevant. Theoretical implications and practical recommendations are discussed.