I, Me, Mine: The Effect of the Explicitness of Self-Anchoring on Consumer Evaluations

While research on the formation of consumer attitudes often focuses on the evaluation of product and service attributes, Gawronski, Bodenhausen & Becker (2007) suggest the self-concept is possibly the most fundamental factor impacting the formation of attitudes toward objects. They argue that the self serves as an anchor for evaluating objects when the self is salient by transferring meaning from the self to the object through elaborative associations. Research is needed to unpack the process of self-anchored attitude formation and potential factors influencing this process. One such important factor to examine is the impact of positive and negative information about products and services on attitudes. While prior research demonstrates interesting results for attribute evaluation (a small piece of negative information made consumers more favorable towards products) (Ein-Gar, Shiv, and Tormala 2012), the effect of positive and negative information when the self is salient may be even more fundamental to understanding the process of how self-anchored objects are ultimately accepted or rejected. In addition, traditional attitude theories often focus solely on immediate attitude formation (Cohen and Reed II 2006), however, understanding temporal changes in attitudes may be more useful in explaining observed behavior. In two experiments, we examined how consumer attitudes are affected by positive and negative information about a product and service, over time, when the self is salient.