ABSTRACT
Recently, Meyers-Levy and Malaviya (1999) provided an integrative framework of judgment formation and persuasion. The framework assumes that, when exposed to an advertisement, people use either a fairly effortful and deliberative “systematic” approach to judgment formation or a far less demanding and less rigorous “heuristic” approach. Furthermore, there is an “experiential processing strategy.” When this third strategy operates, judgments are not based on thoughts prompted by a message content per se but rather on sensations or feelings prompted by the very act of processing (Strack, 1992). Judgments that are based on these sensations may require only the most meager level of cognitive resources, as suggested by experiential processing having been demonstrated most frequently in conditions in which cognitive capacity is severely constrained. Other research, however, indicates that the effect of process-generated experiential responses on judgments need not be limited to severely resource-constrained conditions (Meyers-Levy & Malaviya, 1999). Regarding this, this chapter considers an experiential processing strategy that requires elaborated cognitions.
