Do Consumers Hold Grudges and Practice Avoidance Forever? A Markov Chain Model of the Decay of Grudgeholding and Avoidance Attitudes

Abstract

How do individuals with strong grudgeholding and avoidance attitudes react to counterattitudinal information that is factual and objective and comes from credible sources? Using the elaboration likelihood model, social judgment theory and the characterization-correction model (Ahluwalia 2000), this article discusses the rationale and proposes a framework behind a change in grudgeholding and avoidance attitudes of individuals. The reduction in grudgeholding and avoidance attitudes of individuals over time, when individuals are exposed to factual and objective counterattitudinal information from credible sources, is modeled as a finite markov chain.