Abstract
At large attitudes are built on earlier experience with the attitude object. If earlier experiences are not available, as is the case for unfamiliar attitude objects such as new technologies, no stored evaluations exist. Yet, people are still somehow able to construct attitudes on the spot. Depending on the familiarity of the attitude object, attitudes may find their basis more in affect or cognition. The current paper investigates differences in reliance on affect or cognition in attitude formation toward familiar and unfamiliar realistic attitude objects. In addition, individual differences in reliance on affect (high faith in intuition) or cognition (high need for cognition) are taken into account. In an experimental survey among Dutch consumers (N = 1870), we show that, for unfamiliar realistic attitude objects, people rely more on affect than cognition. For familiar attitude objects where both affective and cognitive evaluations are available, high need for cognition leads to more reliance on cognition, and high faith in intuition leads to more reliance on affect, reflecting the influence of individually preferred thinking style. For people with high need for cognition, cognition has a higher influence on overall attitude for both familiar and unfamiliar realistic attitude objects. On the other hand, affect is important for people with high faith in intuition for both familiar and unfamiliar attitude objects and for people with low faith in intuition for unfamiliar attitude objects; this shows that preferred thinking style is less influential for unfamiliar objects. By comparing attitude formation for familiar and unfamiliar realistic attitude objects, this research contributes to understanding situations in which affect or cognition is the better predictor of overall attitudes.
Highlights
This study showed that attitude formation processes for realistic unfamiliar attitude objects rely more on affect than is the case for realistic familiar attitude objects
By focusing on unfamiliar realistic attitude objects, where some knowledge in the context can be expected, the current study addresses the gap between attitude research that either focused on attitude objects where a meaningful reference point is lacking or focused on familiar attitude objects
The results showed that, for the more familiar attitude objects, cognition is more predictive for the overall attitude
Summary
Data were collected by a commercial market research agency (GfK; see www.gfk.com), as the first wave in a longitudinal study. The participants opted into this study that was conducted online through the market research agency GfK. As the socio-demographic information of panel members is known to the research agency, the panel allows for stratified random sampling of a nationally representative sample on gender, age, and education level of the Netherlands. The panel consists of approximately 12,000 respondents, who are repeatedly invited to participate in studies. The research agency approached a gross sample of 2500 respondents from their panel, of whom 1907 participated (response rate of 76%). Inspection of responses on all variables showed highly unlikely response patterns for 37 respondents, who had zero variance on all variables. These 37 respondents were removed prior to analyses (valid N = 1870). No further univariate and multivariate outliers were detected
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