The effects of regulatory depletion on attitude certainty

Consumers often need to exert substantial psychological resources to manage work-related stress, control impulsive spending, and handle financial anxiety. Therefore, consumers are often in a state of regulatory depletion when they are exposed to advertising messages. Prior research has suggested that such depletion might impair consumers’ ability to generate counterarguments against the advertised message and make them easy to persuade. However, in situations in which consumers have a high motivation to process advertising messages, they process the ad message equally, exhibiting apparently similar responses to advertising whether depleted or not. In this research, the authors propose that in contrast to the conclusions of prior studies, in conditions in which advertising produces equally favorable attitudes and degrees of information processing, depletion has important but previously hidden effects on the degree of certainty or confidence that consumers place in their attitudes.