RUNNING HEAD: The IAT in Consumer Behavior - Wharton Marketing

The IAT in Consumer Behavior 17Chartrand, 1999; Greenwald & Banaji, 1995; Perkins, Forehand, & Greenwald, 2005;Perkins et al., 2006).Interestingly, explicit and implicit measures of brand attitude predict brand choicedifferentially. When under time constraints, consumer brand choice was significantlyinfluenced by prior implicit attitude, while explicitly reported attitudes were morediagnostic when consumers had more time available (Wanke, Plessner, & Friese, 2002).Similarly, Plessner and colleagues (Plessner et al., 2004) looked at the effect of timepressure on product choice of recycled versus non-recycled writing pads, finding thatimplicit attitudes toward recycled versus non-recycled paper predicted product choiceonly when subjects were required to make the product choice within a five-secondresponse window, while explicit measures predicted product choice when there was noresponse window limitation. Taken together, these findings suggest that cognitiveresource limitations may lead people to base choices on implicit associations in memory,since they lack the cognitive resources to go through conscious deliberation. Whileexploring consumer behavioral situations where a dissociation between explicit andimplicit attitudes might occur, Vantomme and colleagues (Vantomme et al., 2004)suggested that implicit measures of negative attitudes toward “green” or ecologicallyfriendly products should be both dissociated from explicit measures of attitude towardgreen products, and be less likely to predict product choice, because it was thought thatnegative implicit attitudes toward green products should be consciously modified bysubjects. Interestingly, the reverse was true: implicit attitudes were found to be extremelypositive toward green products, and predicted green product choice.