A Painful Choice: Embodied Influences on Choice Perception

Elements of consumers’ overall situation might infuse judgments of choice difficulty and product dimensions. Contrary to prior research, such choice-extrinsic influences on judgment may not be susceptible to discounting through attribution. Further, choice-extrinsic effects on judgment might be somewhat specific in that physical difficulty affects judgments relating to a feeling of discomfort, but not ones tangential to it, such as choice satisfaction. I demonstrate that the physical discomfort caused by a hand-press leads to judgments of greater choice difficulty as well as lower ratings of manufacturer ethics, but not to lower choice satisfaction (studies 1-2). If explicitly asked to exclude the hand-press difficulty from judgment, consumers can discount the physical pain from judgments of difficulty, but not from judgments of the ethicality of manufacturing conditions (study 2), demonstrating that attribution-discounting is limited.



Citation:

Aner Tal (2009) ,"A Painful Choice: Embodied Influences on Choice Perception", in NA - Advances in Consumer Research Volume 36, eds. Ann L. McGill and Sharon Shavitt, Duluth, MN : Association for Consumer Research, Pages: 1060-1060.

Authors

Aner Tal, Duke University, USA



Volume

NA - Advances in Consumer Research Volume 36 | 2009



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