The Influence of Positive Affect on Variety Seeking among Safe, Enjoyable Products

Abstract

In three brand-choice experiments executed on personal computers, a significant interaction was found regarding the influence of positive affect, induced by the gift of a small bag of candy or sugarless gum, on variety-seeking behavior. In three food categories (crackers, soup, and snack foods), a positive-affect manipulation increased variety-seeking behavior relative to that in the control conditions, when circumstances did not make unpleasant or negative features of the items in the choice task salient. However, when a negative feature, such as the possibility that a product would taste bad, was made more salient, there was no difference in variety-seeking behavior between the subjects who had received the small gift and the control subjects. Positive affect was also found (1) to increase the tendency of subjects to categorize nontypical items as belonging to a predefined product category, (2) to increase credibility that a product designed to reduce negative health effects would be successful, and (3) to increase variety-seeking behavior in choice sets containing the latter two types of items.