| Abstract: | If people like a product, they will automatically like another product from the same brand even if they do not know anything about it (demonstrated in Study 1). In one sense, this may be a reasonable inference—brands that have one good product may be likely to have other good products. But what if people learn that the second product is actually not good? Explicitly, people act as expected—the second product is disliked based on its negative features. Implicitly, however, people's positive attitude toward the first product still influences their liking of the second (Study 2). This attitude transfer effect (Ranganath & Nosek, 2008) shows that people are able to avoid using the qualities of one product to judge another explicitly. But, implicitly, once an attitude is formed toward a brand's product, other products by that brand will inherit some of the original evaluation regardless of their unique qualities. |
