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Abstract:
Decades of theoretical and empirical research in social and cognitive psychology provide strong evidence that consumers process information in two distinct ways: rational and experiential. Surprisingly, there has been very little research attention devoted to directly investigating how different tasks directly impact thinking style. Further, attempts to simultaneously measure the two dimensions of thinking style as either situation-specific or as an enduring state are even fewer and lack validation in a broad context. In three comprehensive studies, we develop and cross-validate a new instrument for measuring experiential and rational task-specific thinking style in the context of a range of performance tasks designed to induce primarily rational or experiential cognition. We establish congruence effects between task-specific thinking style and the nature of the task on performance outcomes, demonstrate the relative impact of task and dispositional thinking style tendencies on task-specific thinking style, and show that task-specific thinking style explains greater variance than dispositional thinking style in predicting performance.

dual process theory, task performance, thinking style, information processing, experiential thinking, rational thinking, priming, online research