When resistance is futile: consequences of failed counterarguing for attitude certainty

This research tests the notion that attitudes after a failed attempt to counterargue may be stronger than attitudes after undirected thinking. Specifically, failed counterarguing may be accompanied by unique metacognitions that serve to strengthen the attitude. The present research examines this issue by giving participants a very strong message and instructing them to counterargue or simply think about the message. Across several experiments, attitudes were as favorable when individuals were trying to counterargue as when they were simply thinking, indicating that counterarguing failed to instill any extra resistance. However, attitudes were held with greater certainty following failed counterarguing compared with following undirected thinking. Furthermore, attitudes following failed counterarguing were more predictive of subsequent behavioral intentions. The metacognitions that follow failed counterarguing are addressed.     

Implicit ambivalence from attitude change: an exploration of the PAST model

Traditional models of attitude change have assumed that when people appear to have changed their attitudes in response to new information, their old attitudes disappear and no longer have any impact. The present research suggests that when attitudes change, the old attitude can remain in memory and influence subsequent behavior. Four experiments are reported in which initial attitudes were created and then changed (or not) with new information. In each study, the authors demonstrate that when people undergo attitude change, their old and new attitudes can interact to produce evaluative responses consistent with a state of implicit ambivalence. In Study 1, individuals whose attitudes changed were more neutral on a measure of automatic evaluation. In Study 2, attitude change led people to show less confidence on an implicit but not an explicit measure. In Studies 3 and 4, people whose attitudes changed engaged in greater processing of attitude-relevant information than did individuals whose attitudes were not changed.     

Effects of mortality salience on evaluation of ingroup and outgroup sources: the impact of pro- versus counterattitudinal positions

Past Terror Management Theory (TMT) research has demonstrated that mortality salience leads to favoritism toward ingroup members and derogation of outgroup members and to polarized attitudes toward the source of pro and counterattitudinal statements. In such research, the individual's group membership and the individual's worldview position were examined separately. Thus, when the individual's group membership was manipulated, one could normally assume that an outgroup member is counterattitudinal and an ingroup member is proattitudinal. It is unclear, therefore, whether ingroup members elicited favoritism from mortality salient participants because of their group membership or because of their presumably proattitudinal position, or both. The authors present two studies in which the individual's group membership and attitudinal position are jointly manipulated. Results showed that among mortality salient participants, the outgroup member received favorable or unfavorable evaluations depending on his position, whereas the ingroup member received moderately positive evaluations regardless of the position taken.     

Priming a new identity: self-monitoring moderates the effects of nonself primes on self-judgments and behavior

When a construct is primed, people often act in construct-consistent ways. Several accounts for this effect have been offered, including ideomotor theory and a social functional perspective. The authors tested an additional perspective, the Active-Self account, whereby primes can temporarily alter self-perceptions. In Study 1, non-African American participants reported feeling more aggressive on an implicit measure following an African American prime. In Study 2, participants reported feeling luckier on an implicit measure following a number 7 (vs. 13) prime. In both studies, these effects were obtained only for low self-monitors, who are more likely to change self-conceptions in response to diagnostic self-information and to use their internal states in guiding behavior. Study 3 showed that low self-monitors also show larger behavioral effects of primes.     

Effects of accusations on the accuser: the moderating role of accuser culpability

Recent research has shown that people can enhance their own reputations by accusing others of faults they possess. However, it is unclear by what mechanism accusing others of one's own misdeeds helps to enhance the reputation of the accuser, and there is no evidence for boundary conditions for this devious tactic. The present research provides evidence that accusations suggest information about the accuser's values and that it is the assumed values of the accuser that are responsible for increases in the accuser's reputation. Furthermore, the present research demonstrates that accusations may only be effective in increasing an individual's reputation when the individual has faults to deflect. When an individual possesses no faults, accusations can actually damage the individual's reputation.     

Self-guide framing and persuasion: responsibly increasing message processing to ideal levels

The current research examines the effect that framing persuasive messages in terms of self-guides (ideal vs. ought) has on the attitudes and cognitive responses of individuals with chronic ideal versus ought self-guides. The strength of participants' ideal and ought self-guides and the magnitude of participants' ideal and ought self-discrepancies were measured using a computerized reaction time program. One week later, participants read a persuasive message about a fictional breakfast product, framed in terms of either ideals or oughts. Matching framing to stronger self-guide led to enhanced message processing activity, especially among individuals who were low in need for cognition. Individuals who read messages framed to match their stronger self-guides paid more attention to argument quality, as reflected in their attitudes and cognitive responses. Messages with self-guide framing that matched individuals' stronger self-discrepancies did not have this effect on processing.     

Improving attitudes towards minority groups by thinking about the thoughts and meta-cognitions of their members

Research on persuasion has shown that for attitudes to change people need to take into consideration not only the thoughts message recipients generate in response to proposals but also how people think about their own thoughts (metacognition). In the present research, we introduce a new perspective for improving outgroup attitudes focused on the distinction between cognition and metacognition but this time applied to the perceptions of others’ minds. Specifically, we examined to what extent thinking about the mental processes of outgroup members influences attitudes towards those outgroups. We compared the impact of thinking about how others think (perceived primary cognition) with how others think about their own thoughts (perceived secondary cognition or metacognition). In the primary cognition treatment, participants answered questions about the thinking processes of outgroup members. In the secondary cognition treatment, participants answered questions that required them to consider how outgroup members think about their own thoughts (i.e., metacognition). Compared to controls, these treatments were capable of improving attitudes of Spanish citizens towards Syrian refugees, South American immigrants, and Roma people. A third study used a minimal group paradigm in which a fictitious outgroup was described as having primary (vs. secondary) cognition. A final study also tested the implications of assuming that groups have one type of cognition or another. The effects of the two treatments varied depending on the type of outgroup.     

Perception and production of tone in aphasia

An acoustical and perceptual study of lexical tone was conducted to evaluate the extent and nature of tonal disruption in aphasia. The language under investigation was Thai, a tone language which has five lexical tones--mid, low, falling, high, and rising. Subjects included six left brain-damaged aphasics (two Broca's, one transcortical motor, one global, one conduction, one Wernicke), one right brain-damaged nonaphasic, one cerebellar dysarthric, and five normals. High-quality tape recordings of each subject's productions of a minimal set of five, monosyllabic Thai words were presented to 10 adult Thai listeners for identification. Results from the phonemic identification tests indicated that tone production is relatively spared in aphasic patients with unilateral left hemisphere lesions. The performance of the global aphasic, however, was considerably below normal. Patterns of tonal confusions further revealed that the performance of all aphasics, except the global, differed from that of normal speakers primarily in degree rather than in kind. Tonal contrasts were signaled at a high level of proficiency by the right brain-damaged and dysarthric patients. Acoustical analysis revealed that F0 contours associated with the five tones for all aphasics, except the global, were similar in overall shape as well as position in the tone space to those of normals. F0 contours for the right brain-damaged patient and the dysarthric also generally agreed with those of normals in terms of shape and position. F0 ranges of both aphasic and nonaphasic brain-damaged speakers were generally larger than those of normals for all five tones. The relationship between tone and vowel duration was generally similar to that of normals for all brain-damaged speakers. A comparison of aphasics' performance on tone perception (J. Gandour & R. Dardarananda, 1983, Brain and Language, 18, 94-114) and tone production indicated that, for the normal and right brain-damaged subjects, performance on the perception task was higher than on production, whereas the opposite was true for the aphasics. These data are brought to bear on issues related to tone production in aphasia, consonant and vowel production in aphasia, hemispheric specialization for tone production, intonation production in aphasia, relationship between speech perception and speech production, and tone production in dysarthria with cerebellar disease.