ABSTRACT
A n examination of contemporary textbooks on consumer behavior reveals that research in this area has been dominated by the use of explicit self-report measures to uncover what consumers think and feel about products, advertisements, or consumption-related behaviors (e.g., Blackwell, Miniard, & Engel, 2001; Kardes, 2002). In fact, social psychology in general has relied heavily on these measures, such as feeling thermometers and Likert-type or semantic differential scales (Kihlstrom, 2004). There is no doubt that self-report measures have helped further our understanding of consumer behavior, and they indeed predict behavior quite well if used appropriately (Ajzen & Fishbein, 1977; Glasman & Albarracín, 2006; Vargas, 2004). Yet despite their popularity there is also some discontent with self-report measures: For instance, they are subject to self-presentational distortions; they require respondents to have conscious access to their attitudes and to be willing to retrieve or construe them (Cacioppo & Sandman, 1981); they are subject to cognitive and communicative biases that occur during question comprehension and judgment formation (Sudman, Bradburn, & Schwarz, 1996);
and perhaps most importantly, self-reports tap into more elaborated thoughts rather than spontaneous reactions (Fazio & Olson, 2003). All of these limitations of course restrict the predictive validity of self-reported attitudes. The recent rediscovery that human behavior in general and consumer behavior in particular is partly inuenced by spontaneous or impulsive processes that can occur outside of people’s conscious awareness (see Dijksterhuis, this volume; De Houwer, this volume) renders self-reports less useful for the prediction of such behaviors. Indirect measures and especially measures based on reaction times-often referred to as implicit measures-seem a promising alternative. To the extent that consumer behavior is inuenced by impulsive processes, and to the extent that implicit measures tap into these processes, implicit measures may prove to be a valuable supplement to researchers’ toolboxes (Fazio & Olson, 2003). This chapter focuses on the prediction of consumer behavior with such implicit reaction time measures.
