The Effects of Accessibility of Standards and Decision Framing on Product Evaluations

In this study, we explore the cognitive process by which people evaluate consumer products. We examine how people's information about good and bad product classes influences the evaluation of product exemplars. Subjects in three experiments learned what constitutes a good alloy (the good standard) and a bad alloy (the bad standard). Then they were exposed to a series of exemplars whose features partially overlapped with the good and the bad standards. In the first two experiments, features associated with the good standard had a greater impact on judgment than features associated with the bad standard. This positive/ negative asymmetry was stronger when the decision was framed positively (e.g., how good is this alloy) than when it was framed negatively (e.g., how bad is this product). Also, the asymmetry was stronger when the standards had to be accessed from memory than when they were visually available at the time subjects evaluated the exemplars. In the third experiment, the addition of features that signaled the absence of good characteristics had more influence on product evaluations than the addition of features that signaled the absence of bad characteristics. Implications of these findings for current models of evaluative judgment are discussed.