Priming Effects on Product Judgments: A Hemispheric Interpretation

Research suggests that priming different hemisphere processing styles with partic-ular types of tasks or stimuli can affect product judgment. Visual spatial or pictorial information seems to activate the undifferentiated, holistic processing style associ-ated with the right hemisphere, while linguistic or verbal information seems to acti-vate the detail sensitive, differentiated processing style associated with the left hemisphere. This proposition and the extent to which it holds for males and females are investigated. Implications of how the findings relate to program context effects and consumer behavior are discussed. G rowing evidence indicates that priming effects occur when consumers judgments of products are influenced by the content of recently activated knowledge structures (Herr 1987; Meyers-Levy 1988; SrullI983). For instance, Herr (1987) found that en-hancing the accessibility of the evaluative implica-tions of products (e.g., the positive associative con-