Researchers from the London Business School and Duke University find that people respond very differently to the same question when typing an answer as opposed to speaking an answer. Thus, online surveys may not be useful for discerning attitude changes over time.
"We find that speaking and typing recruit different cognitive and motor systems, and activate distinct perceptual mechanisms that result in the encoding of distinct memory traces," write Nader T. Tavassoli (London Business School) and Gavan Fitzsimons (Duke University). "In other words, speaking an attitude activates a different representation in the consumers mind than does typing an attitude, and as a function of this changes later expressed attitudes and behaviors."
The findings in this paper are the first to show that verbal production mechanisms affect attitude retrieval, a crucial difference when assessing attitude changes over time. Your response to a question depends on whether you've ever been asked that question before constructing a belief is different than remembering a belief, and cognitive processes are bound up the motor processes by which we express thoughts, explain the authors.
Therefore, if a question is asked the first time in a phone survey and the second time in an online survey, the validity of the results may be compromised.
