Journal of Advertising, vol. 36, no. 3 (Fall 2007), pp. 261–271. © 2007 American Academy of Advertising. All rights reserved. ISSN 0091-3367 / 2007 $9.50 + 0.00. DOI 10.2753/JOA0091-3367360308 Ever since the potential of the Internet as an advertising medi- um was recognized, most people have believed that interactive communication should always be highly engaging and gener- ate positive communication outcomes. For the past decade, along with the mushrooming new-media hype, the body of literature concerning what interactivity is and what it does has rapidly grown. Some empirical studies have indeed found that heightened interactivity of a medium/message yields positive communication outcomes (e.g., Cho and Leckenby 1999; Coyle and Thorson 2001; Macias 2003; Sicilia, Ruiz, and Munuera 2005), while others found that people’s perceived interactiv- ity was positively associated with their attitudes toward the Web sites (e.g., Jee and Lee 2002; McMillan, Hwang, and Lee 2003; Wu 1999). Given the empirical evidence showing the positive effects of interactivity on consumer response, can we draw a conclu- sion that increasing a medium’s interactivity, which produces higher perceived interactivity, would have a uniformly positive impact on consumer attitudes? In other words, is it conclusive that there is a positive linear relationship between interactivity and consumer attitudes? What if the shape of the interactiv- ity–attitude relationship is actually not uniformly linear, but may vary substantially depending on situations? What if even the direction of the relationship may be reversed from positive to negative under certain conditions? In fact, this question is not completely new. Since the late 1990s, the belief that interactivity is always a good thing has been questioned, though sporadically, by some researchers. For example, Bezjian-Avery, Calder, and Iacobucci (1998) compared the effectiveness of interactive and traditional advertising, and found that increasing interactivity might be detrimental to the consumer’s processing of advertising information, particularly complex visual information. Based on the findings, they concluded that under certain condi- tions, “interactivity interrupts the process of persuasion” (p. 31). Moreover, Ariely (2000) found in his serial experiments that the degree of control, which is an important dimension of interactivity, might not always be beneficial for enhancing consumers’ information search/decision quality: Giving users too much control reduced their chances of finding necessary in- formation, which in turn reduced the quality of their decisions. Consistent with Ariely’s findings, Fortin and Dholakia (2005) found similar patterns with decreasing marginal returns, which they named “plateau effects,” between interactivity level and consumer response such as arousal and involvement. Although those previous pioneering studies did not directly tackle the relationship between interactivity and consumer attitudes, they revealed that interactivity might not always be a good thing, since its effects are contingent on various conditions. Here an important question to ask is what the “conditions” are. In other words, what factors determine or moderate the directions and shapes of the relationship between THE MODERATING EFFECTS OF EXPECTATION ON THE PATTERNS OF THE INTERACTIVITY–ATTITUDE RELATIONSHIP Dongyoung Sohn, Cunhyeong Ci, and Byung-Kwan Lee ABSTRACT: Is interactivity always beneficial? Not always. Rather, the effects of interactivity on consumers’ attitudes toward the site (A st ) may not be a context-free outcome, but instead may change across the product categories to which consumers have different “expected interactivity” (EI). This study attempts to show how the interactivity–attitude rela- tionship is moderated by consumers’ varying EI levels. By employing a 3 (high/medium/low Web site interactivity) × 2 (high/low product category expectation) between-subjects factorial experiment, two competing hypotheses of how EI works were tested: (1) whether EI could reverse the direction of the interactivity–attitude relationship (direction-effects hypothesis), or (2) whether EI would change only the magnitude of the effects of interactivity on A st without changing its direction (magnitude-effects hypothesis). The experimental results supported the direction-effects hypothesis rather than the magnitude-effects hypothesis. Implications for further research and advertising practice are discussed. Dongyoung Sohn (Ph.D., University of Texas at Austin) is an assistant professor, School of Mass Communications, University of South Florida. Cunhyeong Ci (M.A., University of Texas at Austin) is an assistant professor, School of Journalism and Mass Communication, Texas State University–San Marcos. Byung-Kwan Lee (Ph.D., University of Texas at Austin) is an as- sistant professor, Department of Industrial Psychology, Kwangwoon University, Seoul, Korea. The present research was supported by a research grant from Kwang- woon University, Seoul, Korea, in 2006.