Most consumer choices are repeat choices driven by habits. Psychological accounts of habits have generally emphasized the driving role of external factors, especially contextual cues, in habit performance. The present research investigates the influence of an individual-difference variable that reflects a more internal driver of habits. Three studies reveal a negative relationship between people’s tendency to generate relatively uncommon word responses in free-association tasks and their tendency to repeat choice behavior across different consumer contexts. These results implicate free associations as having a role in habit performance and inform practical research on predictors of consumers’ repeat choices.
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Drolet et al. (2017) studied this question.
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