Copyright Journal of Consumer Research 2008. 1 Preprint (not formatted or copyedited). Do not quote or cite without permission. 1 The Fit of Thinking Style and Situation: New Measures of Situation-Specific Experiential and Rational Cognition THOMAS P. NOVAK DONNA L. HOFFMAN* August 24, 2008 *Thomas P. Novak (tom.novak@ucr.edu ) is Albert O. Steffey Professor of Marketing and Donna L. Hoffman (donna.hoffman@ucr.edu ) is Chancellor’s Chair and Professor of Marketing at the A. Gary Anderson Graduate School of Management, University of California, Riverside, 900 University Avenue, Riverside, CA 92501. The authors thank Seymour Epstein for his many thoughtful comments on an earlier version of this manuscript, and thank Sean Rhea and James Robbins for their programming and data collection efforts. The authors thank Reviewer B for suggesting Hypotheses 4a and 4b. This research received support from the UCR Sloan Center for Internet Retailing. ABSTRACT Decades of research provide strong evidence that consumers process information in two distinct and qualitatively different ways, termed rational and experiential. However, little research has explicitly measured how situational influences directly impact thinking style and there have been no attempts to simultaneously measure the two dimensions of situation-specific thinking and validate this measurement in a broad context. In six studies, we develop and validate a new instrument for measuring experiential and rational situation-specific thinking style using a range of performance tasks, a set of consumer Web activities, and differing motivation contexts within a task. We establish differences in thinking style across types of tasks and motivations, and congruence effects related to the fit of situation-specific thinking style and the nature of the task on performance and attitudinal outcomes. The results are relevant to a broad range of consumer behaviors and important consumer behavior constructs.