An Integrated Model Of Attitude And Choice: An Interaction Approach

Attitude, preference, and choice models in marketing still continue to be based on the multi-attribute paradigm despite the acknowledgement of affect (feelings and emotions) in brand attitude. Although voluminous work has been done in the area of affect, there has been a lack of research effort to unify the two streams within the attitudinal and choice framework. The objective of this paper is to unify the two streams of research and develop an integrated model of attitude and choice. We define “attitude” as a summarized evaluative judgment based on cognitive beliefs and its evaluative aspect (traditional multi-attribute model), and “affect” is reserved for valenced feeling states and emotions (Cohen and Areni 1991; Erevelles 1998). Our conceptualization of affect is drawn from category-based affective processing in the categorization literature. Fiske and Pavelchak (1986) distinguish between piecemeal versus category-based affective processing. The top-level affective tag may come from a conditioned response to the category label or may be the summation of lower level attribute-based affective tags (Cohen and Areni 1991). Drawing also from categorization theory, the essence of the proposed model is the parallel processing of brand-based attributes and holistic affect and their joint interaction (Fiske and Pavelchak 1986; Dabholkar 1994). For both overall attitude and choice, interaction effect is modeled at the multidimensional expectancy value component (EVC) level. Incorporating interaction effect in the proposed integrated model is a central theme of this study.