The Temporary Construction of Consumer Attitudes

This article investigates factors that affect whether people will construct attitudes based on external information from others, their own direct experience, or some combination of the two. Evidence from two studies suggests that consumers' salient goals and the order and degree of favorability associated with the two types of information (external vs. experiential) are factors that may jointly determine attitude construction. In study 1, participants who were in an evaluative (nonevaluative) frame of mind were more likely to construct their attitudes based on initial (recent) diagnostic information regarding the attitude object (i.e., an advertisement). Participants appear to use an anchoring and adjustment process to construct their attitudes. In study 2, to further test this anchoring and adjustment explanation, we use the well‐established finding that people sometimes express attitude behaviors in line with a third party's views. When a third party created an external contingency, participants no longer systematically anchored on prior or recent information toward the attitude object. The results of these two studies point out the usefulness of identifying (a) processes of attitude construction, and (b) processes of how consumers determine whether a generated attitude is an appropriate guide for their behavior. The findings are discussed in terms of the current retrieval versus construction debate in the attitude literature.