Cognitive Load Has Negative after Effects on Consumer Decision Making

Concurrent cognitive load has a devastating effect on consumer decision making. Implicit in the theorizing about cognitive load seems to be that this negative effect disappears when the load is removed. Three experiments explored whether cognitive load produces after-effects and showed that various types of prior cognitive load increase the subsequent impact of easily available information on brand choice (study 1), product similarity ratings (study 2), and the quantity of food consumed in a taste test (study 3). Information availability was manipulated by means of a salience manipulation (poster display in study 1 and position of product attribute in study 2), and an accessibility manipulation (study 3). Several decades of decision research suggest that the level of elaboration is a crucial aspect of consumer decision making (for an overview, see Petty et al. 1994). The decision process is qualitatively different depending on whether consumers analyze the available information in a deep or a shallow way. Research spawned by several theoretical frameworks has provided empirical support for the prevalence of shallow processing under concurrent cognitive load. These theoretical frameworks seem to share the implicit assumption that consumers resume their default level of elaboration when the load is removed (e.g. Payne, Bettman, and Johnson 1988). We do wonder, however, whether the effects of cognitive load on information elaboration cease when the cognitive load is removed. The assumption that the re-adaptation to normal cognitive demand is abrupt and appropriate has gone untested, although its rejection might have important consequences for the way we understand consumer decision making. In practice, consumer choice under load may not be as prevalent as suggested by the popularity of load manipulations in the research lab. Consumers often have the option of deferring choice (Anderson 2003) and have been shown to prefer choice deferral when they have trouble differentiating the available options (Dhar 1996; 1997), for instance when they are under cognitive load. These findings and common observations suggest that consumer decisions are not necessarily made during but often after these episodes of high cognitive load. Cognitively demanding