Year: 2013
Type: article
Abstract: People tend to report feeling ambivalent in theirattitudes toward objects that are associated with both positive and
negative reactions. Across three studies, I investigated if people
who have both positive and negative reactions to a novel target
would feel less ambivalent about their attitudes if they simply
expected to process valence-inconsistent information, compared to
if they expected consistency or had no explicit expectations. In
each study, people received either mixed or consistent behavioral
information about a target individual as well as a summary. The
summary either was presented before the behavioral information
where it could foster an expectation or after where it could not.
Study 1 replicated past work on ambivalence when the summary
followed the behavioral information but established a new finding
when it came first, namely that people who expected
valence-inconsistent (versus consistent and negative) information
reported less subjective (but not objective) attitudinal
ambivalence than people who did not expect valence-inconsistent
information. Study 2 replicated and expanded on these findings in
comparison to other types of expectations (e.g., no expectations,
undermined expectations), and Study 3 generalized these findings in
comparison to consistent and positive expectations. Finally, the
latter two studies provided mediational evidence that the extent to
which people felt that their expectations had been confirmed
(versus disconfirmed) accounted for the decreased feelings of
ambivalence.
Author: Geoff Royce Oates Durso
Institution: The Ohio State University
Language: English
Subfield: Sociology and Political Science
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2465174137