Can a Rude Waiter Make Your Food Less Tasty? Social Class Differences in Thinking Style and Carryover in Consumer Judgments

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Building on the notion that cognitive processes vary across social classes, we predict that social class shapes thinking style, which in turn affects consumer judgments. In doing so, we employ service failure domains as a way to understand social class effects. Across four studies, we show that, when faced with a failure incident occurring in one service dimension (e.g., rude employees), consumers in the low social class, relative to those in the high social class, carry over to influence their evaluations of the other service dimensions (e.g., food quality) that are unrelated to the failure incident. We further show that low‐class consumers favor a holistic style of thinking, whereas high‐class consumers favor an analytic style of thinking and that these differences in thinking style account for the carryover effects on evaluations. The pattern of the effects exists when the service failure is perceived to be severe rather than minor.