Script interruptions and affective judgments:: the consumer satisfaction

Script interruptions and affective judgments: the consumer satisfaction.. This research analyzes the role of script interruptions in affective judgments. Most of script literature has focused on the relation among script interruptions (Schank y Abelson, 1977) and memory, but there is no empirical research examining the effect of such interruptions in affective judgements. An exploratory research was carried out using judgements about interruptive situations in a consumer context. In the first study, participants were asked to made satisfaction judgements about situations that reflected seven different kinds of script interruption. The situations were related to the restaurant script. Results showed that interruptions affecting the temporal dimension of script structure (e.g., obstacles, distractions) leaded to more extreme satisfaction judgements than discrepancies that don't affect the script sequence (errors). This difference was even clearer when the interruptions were successfully resolved. In the second study, participants judged the diagnosticity of the same situations in forming global judgements about the context (e.g., consumer attitudes). Again, situations reflecting obstacles were judged as more informative than errors and this effect was stronger when the situation was fixed. These findings suggest the importance of temporal structure in script related judgments and the possibility that interruptions act as evaluative prototypes in the formation and expression of attitudes.