If a consumer sees a significant difference between his or her current state of affairs and some desired or ideal state, which step of the consumer decision-making process is the consumer in?
a. problem recognition
b. evaluation of alternatives
c. product choice
d. post-purchase evaluation
e. information search

The consumer would be in the evaluation of alternatives,

Explanation:

This is explained because he is evaluating the current state of affairs agains his desired-ideal state. Therefore the consumer is evaluating which alternative can fit in the current state of affairs.

In the experiment, conducted by Wilson and Emmorey (1998) in which they gave deaf participants signs that were long, trying to mimic words that are long in length (have many letters) to see if they would find a 'word length' effect. it was shown that recall was worse for long signs, just as it is for words that are long in length.