The paper begins with an examination of how the degree of personal involvement in a purchase decision affects the information needed to reduce cognitive dissonance associated with that purchase. The authors argue that, highly involved individuals, because of their high involvement in purchase decisions, are rigid in their preconceived cognitions that led to the purchase. Consequently, they tend to downplay the new cognition and actively look out for purchase supportive information, rather than changing the old cognition that led to the purchase decision. Also, it is proposed that, to overcome the cognitive dissonance associated with a high involvement purchase, more supportive information is needed to overcome the cognitive dissonance associated with a low involvement purchase. Yet another finding of the study is that the willingness of a dissonant individual to accept the new cognition increases with the elapse of time from the time of occurrence of the cognitive dissonance. The study also unveils that, for a typical purchase, the degree of cognitive dissonance felt by more involved purchasers is less than that felt by less involved purchasers. Thus, interestingly, even though the degree of cognitive dissonance felt by highly involved purchasers is lower, the difficulty for them to grapple with it is higher. An associated finding is that more planned and less spontaneous buying behavior is associated with a higher degree of cognitive dissonance.

By nature or nurture, human beings appear to prefer cognitions that are in consonance to those that are not. Cognitive dissonance is a psychological phenomenon that occurs when there exists a discrepancy between what a person believes and information that calls this into question (Festinger, 1957). It is psychologically uncomfortable to hold contradictory cognitions. The psychological discomfort triggers a mental recovery process in the affected individual that can lead to: (1) search for information supportive of the held belief coupled with constant attempts to downplay the cognition that resulted in the phenomenon of dissonance, or (2) to a change in belief reflective of the new condition. Later researchers of cognitive dissonance took leads from the original work by Festinger (1957) and proposed more sophisticated dissonance models: self-consistency model (Aronson, 1992), self-affirmation model (Steele, 1988), and, the new look perspective (Cooper and Fazio, 1984) are some of them. While these models agree with each other in most parts, the major disagreement is on how self-knowledge mediates dissonance (Stone and Cooper, 2003). Although cognitive dissonance has had a long tradition in marketing theory, interest dedicated to empirical research involving cognitive dissonance has been fluctuating, notes Koller and Salzberger (2007).

The moments immediately after purchase, trigger a series of thoughts in the minds of customers. The positive aspects of the lost alternative and the negative aspects of the gained alternative join together and generate mental unsettledness, thus, making the customer rethink the wisdom of the purchase, notes Kassarjian and Cohen (1965). After a purchase, most purchasers tend to think that their cognitive consistency has been compromised to the various marketing interventions made by the seller (Bell, 1967; and Cummings and Venkatesan, 1976). However, according to Sweeney et al. (2000), people have different thresholds for dissonance and it is not necessary that all purchases should lead to cognitive dissonance. Elliott and Devine (1994) notes that cognitive dissonance, even though cognitive, is experienced more than anything through psychological discomfort. Thus, it has got an emotional dimension, too. Hoshino-Browne et al. (2005) explored how culture shapes the situations in which dissonance is aroused and reduced and concluded that culture mends the arousal of dissonance. According to Koller and Salzberger (2007), cognitive dissonance can meaningfully be extended from the post-purchase phase to the pre-purchase and even the pre-decision phase. In the present research, we achieve this end by bringing in the dimension of time spent searching and processing information before the purchase as an intervening variable.

Marketing Management Journal, Consumer Behavior, Cognitive Dissonance, Marketing Theories, Dissonance Theory, Nomological Network, Brand Loyalty, Theoretical Assumptions, Marketing Interventions, Decision Making Process, Social Community Sites, Customer Care Programs.