Abstract
Consumers may base employee impressions on physical appearance and displayed personal objects. In a scenario experiment, using photos of a physician and a 360-degree panorama of his consultation room, we examined the effects of appearance and tangibles on impression formation. Study 1 shows that observers employ various strategies of combining information from different sources when forming an impression of the employee's friendliness and competence. Whereas previous research has shown that impression formation based on personal appearances proceeds in an automatic fashion, the findings of study 2 indicate that impression formation grounded in the perception of tangibles requires more elaborate processing.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 233-237 |
| Number of pages | 5 |
| Journal | Advances in Consumer Research |
| Volume | 36 |
| Publication status | Published - 2009 |
| Externally published | Yes |