The Impact of Product Review Writing on Attitude Formation

Putting emotional experiences into words has been shown to evoke various health and psychological consequences. Extending these ideas, our research examines the impact of writing on the evaluation of consumption objects. We argue and demonstrate that under certain conditions, consumers’ ratings of a product are systematically biased when they are first given the chance to write a product review. In an experiment using short films, the bias was obtained for two different review manipulations which focused on distinct properties of the viewing experience. Importantly, most participants did not believe that their evaluations were affected by the review-writing process, and the effect was not moderated by lay theories about its existence.

Citation:

Stephen Xihao He and Samuel Bond (2009) ,"The Impact of Product Review Writing on Attitude Formation", in NA - Advances in Consumer Research Volume 36, eds. Ann L. McGill and Sharon Shavitt, Duluth, MN : Association for Consumer Research, Pages: 834-834.