Me, Myself, and My Choices: The Influence of Private Self-Awareness on Preference-Behavior Consistency

Research presented in this article examines the impact of private self-awareness on consumer decision making. Three studies report converging evidence that by increasing self-awareness, consumers encounter fewer problems in determining their product attitudes and, thereby, behave in a way that is more consistent with their own personal product preferences. In study 1, the authors found that the compromise effect and the attraction effect are both dramatically reduced under self-awareness, suggesting that self-awareness helps individuals in identifying which attributes are really important to them. This conjecture was confirmed by study 2, in which it was found that the effect of self-awareness on context effects was mediated by more articulated attribute preferences and indistinguishable from the effects of a manipulation that induced people to think of their preferences in advance. In study 3, the authors found that self-aware consumers are more likely to stick to their personal favorite choice options when composing a product set. These findings are consistent with the idea that self-awareness increases consumers' sense of their personal attitudes towards each choice option.