Choosing to Avoid: Coping with Negatively Emotion‐Laden Consumer Decisions

Abstract

This article addresses how consumers resolve decisions involving conflict between attributes linked to highly valued goals, such as an automobile purchase decision requiring determination of how much safety one is willing to sacrifice in order to obtain other benefits. One salient goal for these decisions may be coping with or minimizing the negative emotion generated during decision making. The conceptual framework developed in this article predicts that choosing avoidant options (e.g., the option to maintain the status quo) can satisfy coping goals by minimizing explicit confrontation of negative potential decision consequences and difficult trade-offs. Two experiments demonstrate that reported emotion can be altered by manipulating decision attributes, that the opportunity to choose an avoidant option mitigates levels of reported emotion, and that increasingly emotion-laden decision environments are associated with more choice of avoidant options. Mediation analyses indicate that actual choice of an avoidant option results in less retrospective negative emotion (in experiment 1) and that increased initial negative emotion results in increased choice of avoidant options (in experiment 2). Mediation analyses for experiment 2 also indicate that increased response times mediate avoidant choice, in contrast to explanations of the status quo bias and similar choice phenomena that appeal to decision makers' desires to minimize cognitive effort.

The future of consumer decision making

“…For example, a typical trade-off difficulty arises when we try to decide which we value more: low price or product safety. If the task is too complex, it may prevent people from choosing at all [30]. Emotions have been shown to affect cognitive processes [31] and play a rather important part in decision-making [32,33].…”

“…Emotions have been shown to affect cognitive processes [31] and play a rather important part in decision-making [32,33]. Negative emotions during the decision process arise, especially when the decision task is difficult [30] or when we have time pressure. Our emotions provide immediate and automatic evaluation on the Bgoodness^or Bbadness^of a feature or possible consequence [34].…”

Heart and Mind in Conflict: the Interplay of Affect and Cognition in Consumer Decision Making

“…Researchers recently have shown considerable interest in redressing this imbalance in various domains such as advertising (see, e.g., Batra and Stayman 1990;Edell and Burke 1987;MacKenzie, Lutz, and Belch 1986) and consumer satisfaction (Dubé, Belanger, and Trudeau 1996;Dubé and Morgan 1996;Mano and Oliver 1993;Oliver 1993;Westbrook and Oliver 1991). The consumer choice literature also has not been far behind in redressing this imbalance, with recent work that has provided both theoretical (see, e.g., Hoch and Loewenstein 1991;Loewenstein 1996) and empirical accounts of how affect influences consumer choices (see, e.g., Garbarino and Edell 1997;Luce 1998;Luce, Bettman, and Payne 1997). The broad purpose of this article is to add to this growing body of research in the consumer choice literature.…”

“…Second, in contrast to empirical work that has examined the effects of task-induced affect on consumer choice (Garbarino and Edell 1997;Luce 1998;Luce et al 1997), where the focus has been on negative affect arising from the structure or difficulty of the task, the focus of this article is on the effects of positive affect arising from the stimulus (see Fiske and Taylor [1991] for a discussion of the importance of examining both negative and positive affect due to their differential effects on memory, judgment, persuasion, and decision making; in the rest of this article, we use the term "stimulus-induced affect" rather than "task-induced affect" to distinguish our work from previous work).…”

How Emotions Enter into Decision Making: A Novel Categorization of Types of Emotions

“…Cohen et al (2008) refer to this as "taskrelated affect", which, according to them, lies somewhere between integral and incidental emotions and refers to affective responses that are elicited by the task or the process of making judgments and decisions. A very basic example of this type of emotion would be when the aversive emotional experience of having to make trade-offs across important attributes, leads consumers to prefer avoidant options such as choosing the status quo (Luce, 1998). The converse would be the unpleasant feelings evoked when one has to forego attractive options (Dhar & Wertenbroch, 2000).…”