Spoken and Typed Expressions of Repeated Attitudes: Matching Response Modes Leads to Attitude Retrieval versus Construction

Speaking and typing recruit different cognitive, motor, and perceptual systems that result in the encoding of differentiated memory traces. These factors did not affect the expression of stimulus-based attitudes. However, matching response modes resulted in more consistent repeated attitudes in experiment 1 and more predictable choice behaviors in experiment 2 than mismatching response modes. Judgment-confidence and recall data in experiment 3 indicate that matching (mismatching) response modes leads to attitude retrieval (construction). These findings are of growing relevance to marketers and opinion pollsters who assess attitudes ex-pressed orally and, increasingly, in typed form over the Internet. Consider a situation in which a consumer expresses anattitude in an Internet chat room. A second consumer expresses an attitude in a face-to-face conversation. At a later point in time both again express their attitudes in a telephone conversation. Whose attitudes will be more con-sistent across the two occasions? Are their delayed attitudes simply retrieved, or are they reconstructed? What if each of