The mere perception of elaboration creates attitude certainty: exploring the thoughtfulness heuristic

Attitude theory has long proposed a mechanism through which antecedents of message elaboration produce attitude strength consequences. However, little direct evidence exists for the intervening process. The proposed thoughtfulness heuristic holds that perceiving that more thought has taken place leads to greater attitude certainty. Two roles were established for this heuristic: first as a mediator of the impact of antecedents of elaboration on attitude certainty and second as a way to influence attitude certainty independent of actual elaboration. In Studies 1 and 2, antecedents of elaboration (need for cognition, distraction) impacted attitude certainty because they impacted the actual amount of processing, which in turn affected perceptions of the amount of processing. In Studies 3 and 4, a manipulation of perceived thought impacted certainty independent of actual thought (i.e., after thinking had already occurred). Furthermore, the thoughtfulness heuristic was shown to influence behavioral intentions, establishing perceived amount of processing as both a mediator and an independent cause of attitude strength consequences.     

Resistance can be good or bad: how theories of resistance and dissonance affect attitude certainty

This research investigated how lay theories about resisting persuasion can affect attitude certainty. Specifically, people who believed that resistance was negative (i.e., implies close-mindedness) showed different levels of attitude certainty after resisting persuasive messages than people who believed resistance was positive (i.e., implies intelligence). When people held positive lay theories of resistance and overcame ostensibly strong arguments, they showed increased attitude certainty (compared to those who overcame ostensibly weak arguments). However, individuals who believed that resistance was negative did not show increases in attitude certainty when overcoming strong arguments. Experiment 2 suggests that the effect of lay theories and perceived argument strength on attitude certainty was due to dissonance created by believing that resistance is undesirable but nonetheless resisting persuasion.     

Tracing Attitude Expressions: An Eye‐Tracking Study

Attitudes represent object evaluations, comprising complex underlying cognitive and affective knowledge structures. When people are asked to judge an object, they can use their primary response (i.e., the immediate object‐evaluation linkage) or underlying affective and cognitive knowledge structures. In many situations, a primary response satisfices, but if not, more elaboration is required. Both processes are fundamentally different but may lead to the same attitude. For monitoring underlying processes during attitude expression, we developed an innovative eye‐tracking procedure using eye‐gaze on response scale options. This procedure was applied in three studies to identify the extent to which elaboration differs for attitude objects with weak or strong, univalent or mixed object evaluations (i.e., univalent, neutral and ambivalent). In Study 1, the overall judgment preceded processing of more specific affective and cognitive linkage evaluations. In Studies 2 and 3, the order was reversed, and affective and cognitive bases were assessed prior to overall attitude outcomes. For attitude objects with strong univalent or strong mixed object evaluations, we found similar outcomes on underlying processes. For weak object evaluations, cognition was found to be more predictive and easily accessible if an overall judgment was required first; affect for these objects was more predictive if people had to elaborate on affect and cognition first. We concluded that both affective and cognitive attitudes may require substantial elaboration, albeit in different situations. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Implicit Consistency Processes in Social Cognition: Explicit‐Implicit Discrepancies Across Systems of Evaluation

What happens when our automatic evaluations conflict with our attitudes that we can reflect on and articulate? In this paper, we review some processes by which explicit implicit evaluative discrepancies (EIEDs) arise and can impact our thoughts, feelings, and behavior, using a dual‐systems perspective on attitudes to explain the psychological processes underlying these evaluative inconsistencies. EIEDs emerge when differential positive and negative evaluations toward attitude objects reside in systems of knowledge governed by language and reasoning (i.e., explicit evaluations) and systems of knowledge that are association‐based (i.e., implicit evaluations). We discuss factors that produce EIEDs, including the influence of extrapersonal associations on attitudes, temporal, and qualitative differences in encountering attitude‐relevant information, and the differential influence of processing goals. Finally, we discuss consequences of holding EIEDs, including their impact on behaviors toward attitude objects, enhanced elaboration and scrutiny of social information, motivated reasoning, errant affective forecasting, and self‐regulatory success and failure.     

态度强度的维度结构与研究操作

态度强度指态度具有坚持性和抵抗性的程度及其对信息加工过程和行为产生影响的程度,包括可获得性、两面性、确定性、精细加工、极端性、重要性、知识性、个人相关性和结构一致性9个常见维度。文章介绍了态度强度的操纵和测量方法,对探讨态度强度维度结构的已有研究进行了阐述和总结,在此基础上指出态度强度至少包含三重维度结构,并提出将态度强度与群体水平变量和社会预警系统相联系等研究角度     

Attitude strength: Distinguishing predictors versus defining features

Attitudes play a fundamental role in many aspects of social psychology, but researchers have long recognized that attitudes vary in their susceptibility to change and their influence on behavior and cognitive processes. This insight lies at the heart of attitude strength, which is defined as an attitude's durability and impact. A variety of attitude attributes such as certainty and ambivalence have been shown to correlate with these aspects of attitude strength, which has made for some confusion as to what variables define strong attitudes versus predict an attitude's strength. In this article, we highlight this distinction between predictors and defining features of strength and review recent programs of research demonstrating the independence of strength‐related attitude attributes and attitude strength itself. Specifically, although some attitude attributes are associated with the attitude's durability and impact, there are conditions under which those attributes fail to predict attitude strength or even have the opposite effects. Throughout, this review reveals nuances in the attitude strength literature and provokes new questions for future inquiry.     

Determinants of consumer attitude toward corporate sponsors: A comparison between a profit and nonprofit sport event sponsorship

The purposes of the present study were to identify key attributes of sponsors that positively influence consumers' attitude formation and to examine the moderator role of sport event types (nonprofit vs. profit). Based on the theories of range and selective attention, we hypothesized that consumers weigh differently on particular sponsorship attributes depending on event type (i.e., profit vs. nonprofit) in constructing their attitude. The study utilized multi‐group structural equation modeling on data collected by questionnaire survey from a total of 505 spectators of college sport event (n = 303) and FIFA World Cup (n = 202). Results of structural equation modeling test indicate that prominence of sponsors is an important predictor of consumer attitude in both events, while sincerity of sponsors was found to be important in local and amateur college sport event sponsorship. From a theoretical perspective, the current study sheds light on sponsorship study, particularly the importance of examining sponsor characteristics in predicting consumer attitude and the event type as a moderating variable. A key practical implication is that sport managers should carefully examine consumers' perceptions toward sponsor characteristics in making their event sponsorship decisions. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Exploring the Valence‐Framing Effect: Negative Framing Enhances Attitude Strength

In his now‐classic research on inoculation theory, McGuire (1964 ) demonstrated that exposing people to an initial weak counterattitudinal message could lead to enhanced resistance to a subsequent stronger counterattitudinal message. More recently, research on the valence‐framing effect ( Bizer & Petty, 2005 ) demonstrated an alternative way to make attitudes more resistant. Simply framing a person's attitude negatively (i.e., in terms of a rejected position such as anti‐Democrat) led to more resistance to an attack on that attitude than did framing the same attitude positively (i.e., in terms of a preferred position such as pro‐Republican). Using an election context, the current research tested whether valence framing influences attitude resistance specifically or attitude strength more generally, providing insight into the effect's mechanism and generalizability. In two experiments, attitude valence was manipulated by framing a position either negatively or positively. Experiment 1 showed that negatively framed attitudes were held with more certainty than were positively framed attitudes. In Experiment 2, conducted among a representative sample of residents of two U.S. states during political campaigns, negatively framed attitudes demonstrated higher levels of attitude certainty and attitude‐consistent behavioral intentions than did attitudes that were framed positively. Furthermore, the effect of valence framing on behavioral intentions was mediated by attitude certainty. Valence framing thus appears to be a relatively low‐effort way to impact multiple features associated with strong attitudes.     

The Temporary Construction of Consumer Attitudes

This article investigates factors that affect whether people will construct attitudes based on external information from others, their own direct experience, or some combination of the two. Evidence from two studies suggests that consumers' salient goals and the order and degree of favorability associated with the two types of information (external vs. experiential) are factors that may jointly determine attitude construction. In study 1, participants who were in an evaluative (nonevaluative) frame of mind were more likely to construct their attitudes based on initial (recent) diagnostic information regarding the attitude object (i.e., an advertisement). Participants appear to use an anchoring and adjustment process to construct their attitudes. In study 2, to further test this anchoring and adjustment explanation, we use the well‐established finding that people sometimes express attitude behaviors in line with a third party's views. When a third party created an external contingency, participants no longer systematically anchored on prior or recent information toward the attitude object. The results of these two studies point out the usefulness of identifying (a) processes of attitude construction, and (b) processes of how consumers determine whether a generated attitude is an appropriate guide for their behavior. The findings are discussed in terms of the current retrieval versus construction debate in the attitude literature.     

From repetition to conviction: Attitude accessibility as a determinant of attitude certainty

The present experiment investigated the influence of attitude accessibility on several meta-attitudinal strength measures. It was predicted that certainty and perceived likelihood of change, i.e., commitment-related attributes of attitude strength, are influenced by changes in attitude accessibility, while no effects were expected for importance and perceived centrality to values and the self, i.e., centrality-related attributes. Accessibility was manipulated by having participants express their attitudes either repeatedly or only once. As hypothesized, accessibility and measures of commitment were enhanced after repeated expression compared to single expression. Furthermore, mediation analyses supported the idea that subjective commitment may be inferred from the ease of attitude retrieval. Centrality-related attributes were found to be unaffected by the accessibility manipulation. The results are discussed in the light of a multi-dimensional structure of attitude strength and antecedent processes of meta-cognitive attributes of strength.     

Attitudes in the social context: the impact of social network composition on individual-level attitude strength

Four studies, using both experimental and correlational designs, explored the implications of being embedded within attitudinally congruent versus attitudinally heterogeneous social networks for individual-level attitude strength. Individuals embedded within congruent social networks (i.e., made up of others with similar views) were more resistant to attitude change than were individuals embedded within heterogeneous social networks (i.e., made up of others with a range of views). Mediational evidence suggests that attitudinally congruous social networks may increase attitude strength by decreasing attitudinal ambivalence and perhaps by increasing the certainty with which people hold their attitudes. These results suggest that features of the social context in which an attitude is held have important implications for individual-level attitude strength.     

The role of amount,cognitive elaboration,and structural consistency of attitude‐relevant knowledge in the formation of attitude certainty

Despite their intuitive plausibility and prominence in theorizing regarding attitude certainty, past studies have provided equivocal evidence for the role of informational and structural consistency factors in perceptions of attitude certainty. The present research attempted to overcome methodological and conceptual limitations in past research in order to establish that amount, cognitive elaboration, and structural consistency of attitude‐relevant knowledge are in fact determinants of attitude certainty. As predicted, certainty was influenced by experimental manipulations of all three constructs. Mediational analyses suggested that the amount and elaboration of information manipulations were mediated by subjective impressions of knowledge. Subjective impressions of amount of thought partially mediated the effects of manipulated elaboration. Finally, perceived ambivalence mediated the effects of manipulated consistency of knowledge. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The perceived informational basis of attitudes: implications for subjective ambivalence

Three studies tested the hypothesis that when people receive persuasive messages, their perceptions of the information on which they base their attitudes can determine feelings of subjective ambivalence. Across studies, it is shown that when elaboration (e.g., need for cognition, personal relevance) is high, people have more subjective ambivalence when they perceive that they have based their attitudes on the source of a message rather than the arguments contained in that message. When elaboration is low, this effect is reversed. These findings suggest that people can assess the informational basis of their attitudes and that these assessments influence feelings of attitude ambivalence.     

Lexical-semantic body knowledge in 5- to 11-year-old children: How spatial body representation influences body semantics

This study addresses the relation between lexico-semantic body knowledge (i.e., body semantics) and spatial body representation (i.e., structural body representation) by analyzing naming performances as a function of body structural topography. One hundred and forty-one children ranging from 5 years 2 months to 10 years 5 months old were asked to provide a lexical label for isolated body part pictures. We compared the children’s naming performances according to the location of the body parts (body parts vs. head features and also upper vs. lower limbs) or to their involvement in motor skills (distal segments, joints, and broader body parts). The results showed that the children’s naming performance was better for facial body parts than for other body parts. Furthermore, it was found that the naming of body parts was better for body parts related to action. These findings suggest that the development of a spatial body representation shapes the elaboration of semantic body representation processing. Moreover, this influence was not limited to younger children. In our discussion of these results, we focus on the important role of action in the development of body representations and semantic organization.     

Resistance to persuasion and attitude certainty: the moderating role of elaboration

Recent research has demonstrated that when people resist persuasive attacks, they can under specifiable conditions become more certain of their initial attitudes. The present research explores the role of elaboration in determining when this effect will occur. Using both self-reported differences in situational elaboration (Study 1) and chronic individual differences in the need for cognition (Study 2), it is demonstrated that resisting persuasion increases attitude certainty primarily when elaboration is high. When elaboration is low, resisting persuasion does not appear to impact attitude certainty. These findings shed light on the role of metacognitive factors in resistance to persuasion, pinpointing the conditions under which these factors come into play.     

组织行为学中的时间相关研究与未来方向

绝大部分组织行为学研究都是从静态视角聚焦变量在一段时间内的整体平均水平, 而忽视了时间的角色, 如变量在一段时间内的动态变化特征。通过引入时间的角色, 从动态视角关注变量的动态变化特征并探讨其影响因素和结果, 可能为现有研究提供新的、突破性视角, 进而帮助拓展传统管理理论。鉴于其对理论发展的重要性, 近年来, 部分新近研究开始逐步关注时间的角色, 从动态视角探索变量的动态变化特征。然而, 整体来看, 这类研究仍相对较少, 且分散在不同的研究领域, 还未能形成结构化体系。基于此, 在将相关研究按照两个维度——变量的动态变化特征的类别(趋势 vs. 波动)与变量的动态变化特征的角色(自变量 vs. 因变量)分为四大类别后, 系统地回顾和梳理相关研究, 并厘清研究背后的理论机制。最后, 基于以上梳理分析, 未来研究可从关注变量的波动; 考察趋势、波动和整体平均水平等的交互作用等角度出发, 更加全面、系统地扩展组织行为学理论。     

The Influence of Spokesperson Trustworthiness on Message Elaboration,Attitude Strength,and Advertising Effectiveness

Recent research has shown that information presented by untrustworthy endorsers is likely to be thoughtfully elaborated, whereas information presented by trustworthy endorsers is likely to be unthinkingly accepted (Priester & Petty, 1995). Study 1 manipulated argument quality and assessed cognitive responses to demonstrate that this influence of trustworthiness on persuasion holds for familiar endorsers likely to be used in actual advertisements. Study 2 demonstrated that trustworthiness can be influenced by individuals endorsing too many products, with similar persuasion consequences (i.e., untrustworthy endorsers prompt greater scrutiny of product‐related attributes than trustworthy endorsers). Study 2 also found that the attitudes that resulted from an untrustworthy endorser came to mind faster, even when those attitudes were equivalently positive—thus demonstrating that elaboration can influence attitude accessibility. This research provides evidence that attitude extremity may not be a sufficient indicator of advertising effectiveness, in that equally extreme attitudes can vary as to the bases by which they were formed, their underlying strength, and their effectiveness. Further, this research provides theoretical and strategic insight into the use of trustworthy and untrustworthy endorsers.     

Perceived facial adiposity conveys information about women's health

Although several prominent theories of human facial attractiveness propose that some facial characteristics convey information about people's health, empirical evidence for this claim is somewhat mixed. While most previous research into this issue has focused on facial characteristics such as symmetry, averageness, and sexual dimorphism, a recent study reported that ratings of facial adiposity (i.e., perceptions of fatness in the face) were positively correlated with indices of poor physical condition in a sample of young adults (i.e., reported past health problems and measures of cardiovascular fitness). These findings are noteworthy, since they suggest that perceived adiposity is a potentially important facial cue of health that has been overlooked by much of the previous work in this area. Here, we show that ratings of young adult women's facial adiposity are (1) better predicted by their body weight than by their body shape (Studies 1 and 2), (2) correlated with a composite measure of their physical and psychological condition (Study 2), and (3) negatively correlated with their trait (i.e., average) salivary progesterone levels (Study 3). Together, these findings present further evidence that perceived facial adiposity, or a correlate thereof, conveys potentially important information about women's actual health.     

Social comparison processes in the experience of personal relative deprivation

Drawing on social comparison and equity theories, we investigated the role that perceived similarity of a comparison target plays in how resentful people feel about their relative financial status. In Study 1, participants tended to choose a comparison target who was better off, and they selected a target they perceived to be more similar than dissimilar along dimensions that surrounded their financial outcomes. In Study 1, perceived relative disadvantage was positively associated with resentment regardless of the perceived similarity of the comparison target. The results of Studies 2 to 5b clarified these findings by showing that being both similar and dissimilar to a target can cause resentment depending on the context. Using hypothetical and real social comparisons, we found that people are more dissatisfied with their financial outcomes when their comparative targets have the same background qualifications (i.e., are similar) but are financially better off (Studies 2, 3b, 4, and 5b). However, we also found that when the comparative financial contexts were similar (i.e., equal affluence), participants were more dissatisfied when their target for comparison had lower qualifications (i.e., was dissimilar; Studies 2, 3a, 4, and 5a). In all cases, perceptions of unfairness mediated the effects of social comparison on financial dissatisfaction. Taken together, these studies address some of the ambiguities around what it means to be similar to a target in the context of social comparisons of affluence, and they underscore the importance of perceived unfairness in the link between social comparison and resentment with one's financial status.     

Cognitive schemas and thought as determinants of attitude change

It was hypothesized that thought would result in greater attitude polarization than distraction and that this effect would be more pronounced with better developed schemas (naive theories) for thinking about the attitude object. In Study 1, it was reasoned that persons have better developed schemas (e.g., implicit personality theories) for thinking about individuals than for thinking about groups. In Study 2, it was reasoned that men have better developed schemas for thinking about football and women have better developed schemas for thinking about women's fashions. In both studies, the hypothesis was significantly confirmed.