Category-Based versus Piecemeal Processes Underlying Evaluations of Restaurants

Abstract

This study tested Fiske and her colleagues' impression-formation model in the evaluations of stores. 280 undergraduate students in a business school served as subjects. As the inconsistency between a store and its associated category schema increased, the store was evaluated more slowly, fewer categorization responses were generated, more attribute-oriented responses were produced, the correlation between over-all judgments and category affect became lower, and the correlation between over-all judgments and attribute evaluations became higher, so the results generally supported the prior model of Fiske, et al.