Sometimes It Just Feels Right: The Differential Weighting of Affect-Consistent and Affect-Inconsistent Product Information

An affect-confirmation process is proposed to explain the conditions in which information that is similar in valence (i.e., evaluatively consistent) with a person’s mood is weighted more heavily in product judgments. Specifically, the affect that participants experience as a result of a transitory mood state may appear to either confirm or disconfirm their reactions to product information, leading them to give this information more or less weight when evaluating the product as a whole. This affective confirmation typically occurs when hedonic criteria are considered more important in evaluation than utilitarian criteria. Four experiments confirmed implications of this conceptualization. The affect that people experience at the time they receive information about an object can influence the manner in which they process this information and, therefore, the judgments that follow. This influence has been detected in both consumer judgment and elsewhere (for reviews, see Clore, Schwarz, and Conway 1994; Cohen and Areni