Consumer Behavior Attitudes

Attitudes guide many aspects of consumer behavior. Having a positive attitude toward a product leads consumers to take pro-product actions, such as purchasing the product or recommending it to other consumers. Even though favorable attitudes toward the product can increase purchase intentions or other behaviors, simply establishing positive attitudes toward one’s product is not enough. In part, this is because attitudes are more influential when they are strong rather than weak (Petty & Krosnick, 1995). Though many properties of attitudes have been identified as predictive of how strong an effect the attitudes will produce (see Petty & Krosnick, 1995, for an overview), one attitude property that has received substantial attention is attitudinal ambivalence. Attitudes that are held with ambivalence produce different consequences than attitudes held without ambivalence in the domains of information seeking (e.g., Sawicki et al., 2013), information processing (e.g., Clark, Wegener, & Fabrigar, 2008; Zemborain & Johar, 2007), purchase intentions, and behaviors (e.g., see Hong & Lee, 2010; Wegener, Kelly, Wallace, & Sawicki, 2014). Because ambivalence can play an important role in determining the effects of the attitude on thinking and …show more content…
That is, disagreement with another consumer might primarily affect subjective ambivalence if the disagreement bothers the perceiver, and agreement might primarily affect subjective ambivalence if the agreement makes the perceiver feel better about his or her views of the product. If such emotional implications of the (dis)agreement play a role in subjective ambivalence, this implies that consumers who are attentive to (and sensitive to) such emotional reactions might be especially likely to show strong social influences on subjective