Assimilation or Contrast?: Comparison Relevance, Distinctness, and the Impact of Accessible Information on Consumer Judgments

Abstract

In 3 studies we demonstrate that the direction of context or information accessibility effects on consumer judgments is dependent on the comparison relevance and distinctness of the activated information. Accessible information yields contrastive judgment effects (that occur in both judgments of “new” and “familiar” stimuli) when the activated information is sufficiently distinct and comparison relevant to be used as a scale anchor, whereas it yields assimilative interpretation effects (that only occur in judgments of new stimuli of which the meaning is ambiguous) when the activated information is relatively indistinct and comparison irrelevant. Theoretical implications and practical recommendations are discussed.