ABSTRACT
Consumers are ordinary human beings who happen to be engaged in activities related to the purchase of products or services. It should come as no surprise, therefore, that the psychology of the consumer deals with the same kinds of issues as psychology in general: memory and cognition, a ect and emotion, judgment and decision making, group dynamics, and the myriad of other topics covered in the psychological literature. As is evident in this volume, consumer psychologists employ the concepts, theories, and ndings of psychology-and in particular of social psychology-to explain the behavior of the consumer (see Bagozzi, Gürhan-Canli, & Priester, 2002; Simonson, Carmon, Dhar, Drolet, & Nowlis, 2000). In the present chapter, I examine social psychological theory and research on the attitude-behavior relation as it applies to consumer behavior.
