Priming Price: Prior Knowledge and Context Effects

Abstract

Category priming has recently stirred the interest of judgment researchers. By unobtrusively presenting exemplars of a category, that category becomes temporarily more accessible from memory and more likely to be used subsequently in processing new information. This research extends work in cognitive and social psychology to consumer judgments. The two studies presented here examine conditions under which cognitive categories of price may be primed and the resulting effects on product judgment. The results also suggest that these effects are influenced by individual differences in consumer knowledge.