Ideals and Oughts and the Reliance on Affect versus Substance in Persuasion

Abstract

people’s hopes, wishes, and aspirations, and (b) oughts, which relate to people’s duties, obligations, and responsibilities. We propose that, in persuasion, the ac-cessibility of ideals increases consumers ’ reliance on their subjective affective responses to the ad relative to the substance of the message, whereas the ac-cessibility of oughts increases consumers ’ reliance on the substance of the mes-sage relative to their subjective affective responses. This phenomenon is accom-panied by a relative change in the perceived diagnosticity of the two types of information under accessible ideals versus oughts—a change that can be related to the distinct modes of self-regulation that ideals and oughts trigger. The phe-nomenon appears to be unrelated to the kind of change in depth-of-processing posited by the Elaboration Likelihood Model and the Heuristic-Systematic Model. Evaluative judgments can be based on two distinct typesof information or inputs: (a) information that pertains to the essence of the target to be evaluated (e.g., the strength of advertising claims, the compellingness of product attrib-utes, or the professional experience of a job candidate) and