Effects Of Attributional Style And Emotion On Purchasing Decision

Purchase decision, which refers to consumer choice, is a dynamic process of determining strategy. It needs consumers' using of their sense of perception, attention, memory, thinking and other cognitive abilities, to judge and choose a certain situation. It is an important part of the decision-making study over the past 40 years and can be divided into five stages ,including needs causing, information collecting, projects evaluating, purchase deciding and behavior after purchasing. Two methods are mainly used in the studies of purchase decision: one is exploring and the other is problem solving. And in terms of theoretical explanations, the cognitive processing model has the largest impact on the purchase decision. This theory indicates that consumers must explain or understand the significance of the information in the environment around them. A variety of knowledge and beliefs are generated during the process of interpretation and understanding, and these may be stored in their memory, and then are activated for the integration process. At the same time, the knowledge about the products in consumer' memory storage may even be continuously activated because of its linking of other activated ideas. By means of this spreading activation, all the related knowledge in memory can influx of the consumers' mind when they make their purchase decision. Finally, consumers will integrate the variety of knowledge on the products in order to create an overall evaluation, and then to make a choice among the various options.Purchase decision has been confirmed by many studies. By analyzing these studies, we can find that they can be divided into two main sorts emphasizing differently: one is about the phenomenon of consumers buying decision, and the other is the study about the mechanism of purchase decision. The former mostly concentrated in the situational factors such as the physical surroundings of shopping sites, the social atmosphere of shopping sites, time-related factors, task types and consumers' state before purchase. While the latter mainly concentrated in the influence of the consumers' psychological variables on the purchase decision, and some studies also explored the consumer purchase decisions with the perspective of the attribution theory. However, attribution style is rarely involved in purchase decision.A considerable amount of researches shows that attribution style has an important impact on decision making because it is an important variable to study individual differences. However, there is no ascertained conclusion on the patterns how attribution style impacts purchase decision.Particularly, recent studies show that emotion is an important variable which has an impact on decision making, and it is also one of the 16 unresolved issues in the field decision making. As a result, exploring the impact of emotions on decision making is becoming increasingly important.To sum up, this study made questionnaire of the consumers' decision-making factors questionnaire on the basis of previous researches and also carry out two experimental studies to explore the impact of the attribution style on the consumer purchase decisions.The first experiment tries to explore the impact of the attribution style on consumer purchase decisions by means of introducing attribution style as a new variable (positive / intermediate / negative attribution style).On the basis of the first experiment, the second experiment use a new variable called emotion (positive emotion / negative emotion) to explore the impact of the attribution style on the consumers' purchase decisionsThe results show that: (1)the quality of the decision-making has a significant difference among the subjects with different attribution styles. The subjects with positive attribution style made highest-qualitied decisions, the intermediate's decision, and the negative ones' were worse. (2)The average decision time also has notable difference among the subjects with different attribution style. The subjects with positive attribution style spent the longest time on processing decision-making tasks, the intermediate's took the second place, and the negatives were the quickest;(3) the search depth of information of the three kinds of attribution style subjects were ordinal lower. The search depth of the information of the positive subjects was significantly higher than that of the middle-style and negative-type style;(4) the decision makers with the positive- and intermediate-style attributed are more inclined to use linear strategy in the purchase decision-making tasks dimensions; while the decision-makers with the negative attribution style are more inclined to use nonlinear strategy (5)the attribution style and emotion have influence on the purchase decisions of consumers.(6) The quality of decision making of subjects who have various attribution style are enhanced by positive emotion, therefore the process time used are getting longer and the depth of information searching is enlarged, and at the same time the optional processes are preferred by information searching pattern. The situation of the participant who has negative emotion is on the contrary. (7) The emotion impact the subjects' information processing capacity, who have different attribution style...