Making judgments in a two‐sequence cue environment: The effects of differential cue strengths, order sequence, and distraction

Consumers frequently evaluate multiple sequential cues of varying strengths in order to draw inferences about a product's quality. The results of three experiments show that when consumers are not distracted, they judge a product's quality more favorably following a strong–weak cue sequence relative to a weak–strong sequence (a primacy effect). However once consumers are distracted from the evaluation task, the primacy effect reverses to a recency effect, whereby consumers judge a product's quality more favorably following a weak–strong cue sequence. Process tests suggest that distraction crowds consumers' short‐term working memory and inhibits the spontaneous rehearsal and the subsequent recall of the cue presented first in the information sequence.