Self-Monitoring and Consumer Behavior

In the present research, the relationship between the psychological construct of self-monitoring (Snyder, 1974) and consumer behavior is investigated. The word association study undertaken for the present paper was deliberately unstructured. This type of methodology provides respondents with a context-free environment in which contents of fruit and vegetable knowledge structures1 can be elicited. This is the first such study that examines self-monitoring in a free-recall situation, and the results are instructive in providing more information on the specific nature of self-monitoring effects. Furthermore, the results of this study demonstrate a relationship between two sub-disciplines of psychology, namely self-monitoring (Snyder, 1974) and decision-making (Damasio, 1994, Epstein, 1997; Hammond, 1996).