Aprendizagem de categorias : como o contexto da decisão de consumo afeta a aprendizagem de atributos horizontais e verticais

• Autor(a) principal: Callegaro, Ana Rita Catelan
• Data de Publicação: 2016
• Tipo de documento: Tese
• Idioma: por
• Título da fonte: Biblioteca Digital de Teses e Dissertações da PUC_RS
• Texto Completo: http://tede2.pucrs.br/tede2/handle/tede/6962
• topic: COMPORTAMENTO DO CONSUMIDOR; CATEGORIAS (PSICOLOGIA); TOMADA DE DECISÕES; ADMINISTRAÇÃO DE EMPRESAS; CIENCIAS SOCIAIS APLICADAS::ADMINISTRACAO

Human categorization assists individuals living in society to organize the world around them and the information that is displayed based on the category formation. A central goal of cognitive psychology is to understand how categories are processed and learned by individuals (MARKMAN; ROSS, 2003). Category learning theory proposed by Kruschke (2005) emphasizes that the categorization of an object determines what to do with it and the consideration given to it, directly affecting the individual's relationship with this object. Although widespread in other areas of knowledge, especially in cognitive psychology, studies focusing on category learning in the consumer context have received little attention (for exceptions see COHEN; BASU, 1987; HUTCHINSON, ALBA, 1981). A question that remains latent concerns how contextual differences can influence different levels of category learning. This study aimed to analyze individuals’s learning considering different attributes (vertical, with more comparison objective standards; or horizontal, where there are no objective standards comparison) and different contexts in which they are inserted (high or low involvement). Initially, we conducted a pre-test to define the contexts of greater or lesser engagement with the situation. Posteriorly, another study was conducted to test the hypothesis proposed in this thesis, that when consumers were exposed to a more involvement situation with the decision would have a greater learning of the vertical attributes compared to horizontal attributes. Already, in a situation of less involvement, learning both attributes would be indifferent. The results of both studies show that the hypothesis was confirmed since there was a greater vertical learning attributes relating to quality in the context of more involvement compared with the horizontal attribute (region). The learning of two types of attributes did not vary in a less-involvement context.