Should consumer attitudes be reduced to their affective and cognitive bases? Validation of a hierarchical model Laurette Dube ´ a, * , Marie-Ce ´cile Cervellon a , Han Jingyuan b a Faculty of Management, McGill University, 1001 Sherbrooke Street West, Montreal, PQ, Canada H3A 1G5 b School of Economics and Management, Hebei University of Science and Technology, Hebei, China Received 14 August 2001; received in revised form 16 January 2003; accepted 21 January 2003 Abstract The authors argue that reducing consumer attitudes to their underlying affective and cognitive bases entails a loss of valuable information. They propose that consumer attitudes be best represented by a hierarchical structure that preserves, at the first level, clusters of attributes formed on the basis of their immediate vs. deliberative nature, these clusters being nested at the second level within affective and cognitive bases. The superiority of this hierarchical structure over alternative models is supported for food attitudes, in a sample of two cultures (French and Chinese) known for different relations between affective and cognitive bases (Study 1). The hierarchical model also demonstrates superior ability to predict behaviors for two food items for which the affective and cognitive bases have a different influence on consumption (i.e., chocolate and raw milk; Study 2). Theoretical and managerial implications of the results are discussed. D 2003 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. Keywords: Attitude bases; Affect/cognition; Utilitarian/hedonism; Confirmatory Factor Analyses 1. Introduction For long, consumer attitudes were viewed as a unidimensional construct reflecting one’s general eval- uation of a product, a brand, or an advertisement, formed through assessment of specific attributes or characteristics of the attitude object (see Bagozzi & Burnkrant, 1980). Over the last decade, there has been a significant shift away from this unidimensional view of attitude, in favor of the discrimination between the affective vs. cognitive, or utilitarian vs. hedonic bases on which attitudes are formed and changed. The affective component pertains to the sensations, feel- ings, and emotions that one experiences in response to an attitude object. For food attitudes, for instance, these may be the hedonic tone of consumption, per- haps the pleasure of sharing it with friends, as well as the pleasant childhood memories that they trigger. The cognitive component of attitudes contains the positive and negative attributes and beliefs about the target. In the food domain, these relate to attributes like nutri- tional value, health consequences, or convenience. Efforts to distinguish the affective and cognitive bases of attitudes and the ways in which these influ- ence various consumer responses have been highly fruitful. Affective and cognitive bases have been elicited for attitudes toward products (Batra & Ahtola, 1990), brands (Leclerc, Schmitt, & Dube ´, 1994; Park, Milberg, & Lawson, 1991), advertisement (Burke & 0167-8116/$ - see front matter D 2003 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/S0167-8116(03)00036-3 * Corresponding author. E-mail address: laurette.dube@mcgill.ca (L. Dube ´). www.elsevier.com/locate/ijresmar Intern. J. of Research in Marketing 20 (2003) 259 – 272