When Does Perceived Hardness Affect Consumers’ Judgments: A Conceptual Replication of Krishna and Morrin (2008)

Drawing on the construal level theory, we replicated and extended Krishna and Morrin's (2008) finding that consumers evaluate water quality to be higher when they drink from a hard cup. The results of our two experiments showed that when they touched a hard object, consumers tended to judge a product as of higher quality when they imagined a near future goal. Conversely, the hardness had no association in the distant future condition.