Arousal : and its effect on attitude extremity towards a direct service

Abstract: The aim of this study is to explain the effect of arousal on consumer’s attitude towards a direct service in terms of evaluation extremity. An important element within consumer behavior is the attitude that consumers have towards products and services. After the conceptual framework was developed through an extensive literature review on arousal, attitude and services, a hypothesis was formulated stating that: Arousal has an effect on consumer's attitude towards a direct service in terms of their evaluation extremity.  An experiment was carried out within various lectures of a university in Sweden, whereas the sampling used was a convenience sample of university students. The total amount of respondents who participated in the experiment were 154, whereof 102 were valid respondents. The experimenttriggerused to influence their level of arousal was caffeinated coffee, while the control trigger was decaffeinated coffee. The Fishbein model was used to measure attitude translated into a questionnaire which was administered at the experiment, while the three adjective scale was utilized to measure the level of arousal for control. The collected data was imported into the statistics program SPSS for analysis and discussion. Quality criteria and ethics standards were adhered to  during the entire research process. At the conclusion of the research, the hypothesis was accepted. However, it should be taken into consideration that the caffeine did not have the desired effect on the level of arousal, and the study mainly used the control questions for arousal to find a significance level. The study was deemed successful though, in that after calculating positive pretests for validity, the results showed that the aroused participants had a significantly more extreme attitude than the non-aroused participants. In that the experiment and results are original, it allows for further related research. Finally, to insure the validity of the results of this study, it is pertinent that the experiment’s results are replicated by future studies.