Getting Emotional with the System that Mirrors You: Cognitive and Affective Attitudes towards Identity-Reflecting Information Systems

Information system (IS) has been considered as the technology that is built on reasoning, so user evaluation is mostly based on cognitive aspects such as usefulness. Yet, this evaluation needs to be extended to include emotion, which can build a strong bond between the system and its users. This paper theorizes a model that shows how users adopt an IS to verify their actual or ideal identities within the context of cognition and affect. Furthermore, it investigates how these cognitive and affective attitudes lead to continuous intention to use IS. Our findings highlight that affective attitude is significant along with cognitive attitude, which has been considered as the most explanatory factor of the continuous intention. It is also found that actual identity-verification affects cognitive attitude, while ideal identity-verification is the antecedent of affective attitude. This study draws attention to the substantive effect of affect on the identity-reflecting IS use.