The Lexicon and Grammar of Affect as Information in Consumer Decision Making The CAlM

As epitomized by Blaise Pascal's famous quote, "The heart has its reason of which reason knows nothing," emotions have historically been conceived as psychobiological forces that energize and channel people's behavior, sometimes at the expense of their better judgment. In advancing the "affect-asinformation" hypothesis that moods, feelings, and emotions serve as sources of information, Schwarz and Clore (1983, 1996) introduced a radical departure from this historical way of thinking about affect. Rather than viewing affect as some kind of force that is separate from people's thoughts, Schwarz and Clore (1983, 1996) conceptualized affective feelings as informational inputs to people's judgment. Building on previous suggestions by Wyer and Carlston (1979), they theorized that people often draw inferences from their momentary feelings toward objects and situations (Schwarz, 1990; Schwarz & Clore, 1996). The most documented ""I:'lT'1=;-:;;;,r----,·inference-the one that Schwarz and Clore (1983, 1988) originally focused on-is -"""'-""""-_--I,an evaluative inference based on the valence of the momentary feelings. People generally interpret pleasant feelings as evidence of liking, satisfaction, or wellbeing, and unpleasant feelings as evidence of disliking, dissatisfaction, or misery. Schwarz and Clore (1988) called this type of inference the "How do I feel about it?" heuristic (hereafter, HDIF heuristic). In early affect-as-information research (Schwarz & Clore, 1983; Schwarz, Strack, Kommer, & Wagner, 1987), the HDIF heuristic was discussed primarily as an explanation for the pervasive assimilative influence that mood states exert on evaluative judgments-a phenomenon known