Estilos de Vida Promotor de Salud de Nola Pender

Individuals evaluate a variety of people and objects on a day-to-day basis. Stressing how important evaluation is to people, Markus and Zajonc (1985) note that “it is not possible to view a social object or a social act without at the same time making an assessment on dimensions closely corresponding to good/bad, pleasant/unpleasant, high/low etc.” Jarvis and Petty (1996) define evaluation as “the assessment of the 51

positive and/or negative qualities of an object”, and consider it to be “among the most pervasive and dominant human responses”.

Difference between Need for Cognition and Need to Evaluate: Individuals who like to think and also enjoy the process of thinking are said to be cognitively inclined. Individuals with a high need for cognition therefore exert comparatively greater cognitive effort, and tend to persevere with cognitive tasks for longer periods of time than individuals with a low need for cognition. The need for cognition scale, which measures this difference in need for cognition, developed by Cacioppo and Petty (1982), has been widely used in many studies. Another widely used scale to measure cognition is the Cognitive Style Index developed by Allinson and Hayes (1996).

Individuals with a higher need to evaluate are said to chronically engage in evaluation from the experiences they have and the information they receive. Those low in the need for evaluation have been shown to be content with simply experiencing life, while those high in the need for evaluation enjoy assessing the benefits and losses of what they do and observe on a frequent basis (Bizer, Krosnick, Petty, Rucker and Wheeler 2002). Need for cognition and evaluation are distinctly different concepts, the main difference being that evaluation can occur in a thoughtful or non-thoughtful manner, whereas it is only the former in cognition. Empirical evidence for the same is drawn from the work of Petty and Cacioppo (1986) who show that attitudes at times can be formed because of the attractiveness of the communicator, and not necessarily by the message being persuasive.

2.3.5.1 Need to Evaluate and Consumer Behaviour

Fazio (2000) notes that individuals, in their daily lives, encounter a multitude of objects. Consumers, too, face many choices every time they shop. There is constant bombardment of information, which forces them to make many decisions as to which items to approach and which not to ignore. Almost every shopping event involves consumers making a continuous cycle of choices based on their interpretations and evaluation of objects. These numerous choices can be quite astoundingly burdensome to some consumers. It is easy to imagine a consumer who is confused or fed up with the need to assess, weighing the pros and cons of the various alternatives available on each product. Consumers are adaptive in nature, and, as in other areas of life, learn from the memory of past experiences. While prior consumer knowledge is helpful, it represents only the first step towards consumers successfully coping with a variety of stimuli that impinge on them. Consumers must retrieve the relevant aspects of the information stored, then consider the implications and finally integrate those implications into a final judgment. Consumers therefore categorise items into likes and dislikes along an evaluative dimension.

Literature shows that consumers who have a high need to evaluate tend to depend more on their own judgments and are less influenced by advertisements and other outside influences. Holbrook (2006), studying the need to evaluate in the field of public opinion has found that the need to evaluate had a positive effect on information acquisition in presidential campaigns. Research closer to marketing suggests that consumers with a high need to evaluate may be put off by specific advertisements and that these advertisements may indeed have a negative effect on

such consumers. Fennis and Bakker (2001) have demonstrated in various studies that after exposure to a number of widely disliked ads, those with high a need to evaluate were more irritated than others. Moreover, their studies show that even when neutral ads and brands were exposed, consumers with a high need to evaluate were more negatively affected than those with a lower need to evaluate. Individuals with a high need to evaluate, therefore, behave like those with a high need for cognition when they form evaluations thoughtfully, but behave as individuals with a low need for cognition when they form evaluations superficially. Research in the field of direct media shows that the need to evaluate moderates the relationship between the need for cognition and direct media. The work of Vieira (2009) shows that buying intentions through direct media are high for consumers low in the need for cognition but high in the need to evaluate. While the relationship between consumers’ need for cognition and their need for cognitive touch is understood, the relationship between consumers’ need to evaluate and their need for cognitive touch has not been studied. Need to evaluate is thus the fifth personality trait chosen in this study.