When Regulatory Fit Does Not ‘Feel Right’: The Inhibiting Effect of Contextually Dominant Decision Strategies

Consumers use a variety of strategies to form judgments and make decisions. For example, When choosing between two alterna-tives, they may select the most attractive one or reject the most unattractive one (Shafir 1993). When forming preferences among several brands, they may compare them on specific attributes or rely on overall evaluations of each brand (Mantel and Kardes 1999). The strategies that consumers use often depend on their motivational orientations, but they also interact with those orientations to influ-ence the value of decision outcomes. Regulatory fit theory (Higgins 2000) maintains that when people use decision strategies that sustain versus disrupt their current motivational orientation, they feel right about what they are doing. This, in turn, leads them to value of the decision process more (Freitas and Higgins 2002) and feel more confident about their subsequent reactions toward the decision outcome, which can increase the extremity of these reac-tions and even the monetary value of a chosen option (Avnet an