The Divergence of Implicit and Explicit Consumer Evaluations

Abstract

This research extends findings that implicit and explicit attitudes may diverge to a consumer evaluation task using multiple measures of implicit evaluation: Evaluative Movement Assessment (EMA; Brendl, Markman, & Messner, 2005) and Evaluative Priming (Fazio, Jackson, Dunton, & Williams,1995). These measures were significantly associated with each other for both positive and negative implicit attitudes. Neither measure predicted explicit liking of the product or explicit intention to purchase the product. We believe this to be the first such demonstrated divergence in a naturalistic, unconditioned consumer evaluation context. Implicit activation of the product’s emotional benefit (e.g., “relaxation”), as assessed in a lexical decision task (LDT), was not associated with the EMA or evaluative priming, but was significantly associated with both explicit emotional state (e.g., relaxation) and explicit purchase intention; the latter effect was not mediated by explicit emotion.

Implicit Attitudes in Consumer Purchase Intent

“…2005a;Summerville, Hseih, & Harrington, 2010). These measures, which include focus groups and surveys, ask participants to introspect and then to divulge their attitudes toward a product.…”

“…Explicit measures have long been used in consumer research (Brendl, Chattopadhyay, Pelham, & Carvallo. 2005a;Summerville, Hseih, & Harrington, 2010). These measures, which include focus groups and surveys, ask participants to introspect and then to divulge their attitudes toward a product.…”

“…The difference between the latencies of a positive versus a negative association may be used to determine whether a person's attitude towards a prime is favorable or unfavorable. The current study uses two implicit measures, the Evaluative Movement Assessment or EMA (Brendl, Markman, & Messner, 2005b;Summerville et al, 2010) and the Lexical Decision Task or LDT (Aarts, Diksterhuis, & De Vries, 2001;Meyer & Schvaneveldt, 1971;Storbeck & Clore, 2008;Summerville et al, 2010), to measure the relative latency times of affects and concepts respectively.…”

“…Comparisons between "toward" and "away from" latencies for each stimulus allows for the target stimulus to be assessed for positive or negative affect. Traditionally, stimuli take the form of words as in Summerville et al (2010). The current study adapts this measure for use with image stimuli in order to make possible the measure of attitudes toward product designs.…”

“…Reaction times to the word associated with the prime are subtracted from a control reaction time to yield a priming score. LDTs have historically used words to prime the task, but more recently, images have been used as well (Summerville et al, 2010). Summerville et al (2010) used both LDT and EMA to study divergence and convergence between implicit and explicit measures.…”