Split Feelings: Understanding Implicit and Explicit Political Persuasion

Research in psychology has established that people have visceral positive and negative reactions to all kinds of stimuli—so-called implicit attitudes. Implicit attitudes are empirically distinct from explicit attitudes, and they appear to have separate consequences for political behavior. However, little is known about whether they change in response to different factors than explicit attitudes. Identifying distinct antecedents for implicit and explicit attitudes would have far-reaching implications for the study of political persuasion. We hypothesized that implicit attitudes would change primarily in response to political advertisements’ emotional valence, but this turned out to be wrong. In contrast, our next hypothesis that implicit (but not explicit) attitudes would improve in response to increased familiarity with an attitude object was supported across several tests. Aside from this finding, our studies illustrate how routine preregistration helps researchers convey what they learned from each test—including when predictions are not borne out.

Love Food, Hate Waste? Ambivalence towards Food Fosters People’s Willingness to Waste Food

Food waste is the origin of major social and environmental issues. In industrial societies, domestic households are the biggest contributors to this problem. But why do people waste food although they buy and value it? Answering this question is mandatory to design effective interventions against food waste. So far, however, many interventions have not been based on theoretical knowledge. Integrating food waste literature and ambivalence research, we propose that domestic food waste can be understood via the concept of ambivalence—the simultaneous presence of positive and negative associations towards the same attitude object. In support of this notion, we demonstrated in three pre-registered experiments that people experienced ambivalence towards non-perishable food products with expired best before dates. The experience of ambivalence was in turn associated with an increased willingness to waste food. However, two informational interventions aiming to prevent people from experiencing ambivalence did not work as intended (Experiment 3). We hope that the outlined conceptualization inspires theory-driven research on why and when people dispose of food and on how to design effective interventions.

The Psychology of Moral Conviction

This review covers theory and research on the psychological characteristics and consequences of attitudes that are experienced as moral convictions, that is, attitudes that people perceive as grounded in a fundamental distinction between right and wrong. Morally convicted attitudes represent something psychologically distinct from other constructs (e.g., strong but nonmoral attitudes or religious beliefs), are perceived as universally and objectively true, and are comparatively immune to authority or peer influence. Variance in moral conviction also predicts important social and political consequences. Stronger moral conviction about a given attitude object, for example, is associated with greater intolerance of attitude dissimilarity, resistance to procedural solutions for conflict about that issue, and increased political engagement and volunteerism in that attitude domain. Finally, we review recent research that explores the processes that lead to attitude moralization; we integrate these efforts and conclude with a new domain theory of attitude moralization.

Attitude Formation and Attitude Change

The study of attitudes formation and attitude change are two defining features at the core of social psychology. An attitude is a set of beliefs that people hold in relation to an attitude object, where an attitude object is a person, a product, or a social group. Since attitudes have been a strong influence on human behavior, social psychologists have viewed attitudes as important to understand behavior of individuals. Firstly, the chapter will introduce the concept of attitude with social psychological perspective. Attitude formation is important to understand to know why people hold different attitudes and how attitudes help to predict their behavior. In the second section, distinct ways of attitudes formation are discussed. It is also important to understand how attitudes influence in decision making, which is also discussed in the next section of the chapter. In the later section, changing processes of attitudes have been discussed.

Accurate by Being Noisy: A Formal Network Model of Implicit Measures of Attitudes

In this article, we model implicit attitude measures using our network theory of attitudes. The model rests on the assumption that implicit measures limit attitudinal entropy reduction, because implicit measures represent a measurement outcome that is the result of evaluating the attitude object in a quick and effortless manner. Implicit measures therefore assess attitudes in high entropy states (i.e., inconsistent and unstable states). In a simulation, we illustrate the implications of our network theory for implicit measures. The results of this simulation show a paradoxical result: Implicit measures can provide a more accurate assessment of conflicting evaluative reactions to an attitude object (e.g., evaluative reactions not in line with the dominant evaluative reactions) than explicit measures, because they assess these properties in a noisier and less reliable manner. We conclude that our network theory of attitudes increases the connection between substantive theorizing on attitudes and psychometric properties of implicit measures.

Attitudes

“Attitudes” refer to summary evaluations of people, groups, ideas, and other objects, reflecting whether individuals like or dislike them. The study of attitudes takes a central position in social psychology. Decades of research have demonstrated that attitudes are important for understanding how individuals perceive the world and how they behave. One of the key aspects of attitudes is their cognitive, affective, and behavioral content. That is, an individual may associate an attitude object with cognitions or beliefs, emotional reactions, and intentions or past actions. The attitude itself may also have a simple (e.g., positive or negative) structure or a more conflicted, ambivalent (e.g., simultaneously positive and negative) structure; it may serve different psychological functions (e.g., simplification of knowledge, value-expression); and it may vary in strength. Diverse techniques have been developed to measure attitudes, showing that they are useful predictors of behavior and that the strength of this link depends on diverse factors, such as how strongly the attitude is held, the individual’s personality, and the context. Overall, the long history of research on attitudes has supported their considerable theoretical and practical relevance.

Perceived Responsiveness Increases Tolerance of Attitude Ambivalence and Enhances Intentions to Behave in an Open-Minded Manner

Can perceived responsiveness, the belief that meaningful others attend to and react supportively to core defining feature of the self, shape the structure of attitudes? We predicted that perceived responsiveness fosters open-mindedness, which, in turn, allows people to be simultaneously aware of opposing evaluations of an attitude object. We also hypothesized that this process will result in behavior intentions to consider multiple perspectives about the topic. Furthermore, we predicted that perceived responsiveness will enable people to tolerate accessible opposing evaluations without feeling discomfort. We found consistent support for our hypotheses in four laboratory experiments (Studies 1–3, 5) and a diary study (Study 4). Moreover, we found that perceived responsiveness reduces the perception that one’s initial attitude is correct and valid. These findings indicate that attitude structure and behavior intentions can be changed by an interpersonal variable, unrelated to the attitude itself.

Attitudes from mere co-occurrences are guided by differentiation

People often form attitudes about objects, individuals, or groups by examining and com-paring their attributes. Such attribute-based attitude formation is guided by a differentiation principle: Whether people come to like or dislike an attitude object depends on the object’s attributes that differentiate it from other objects. Attributes that are redundant with previ-ously-encountered attitude objects are typically “cancelled” out. We tested whether the same differentiation principle applies to co-occurrence-based attitude formation, also known as Evaluative Conditioning. This form of attitude formation describes the phenome-non that attitudes are influenced by positive or negative stimuli that have co-occurred with the attitude object, but which are not inherent attributes of the attitude object itself. Across seven experiments (N = 1611), we consistently found that co-occurrence-based attitude formation is guided by the same differentiation principle as attribute-based attitude for-mation. Specifically, participants’ attitudes towards unknown brands were most strongly influenced by positive or negative stimuli that distinctly co-occurred with a specific brand, and that differentiated that brand from previously-encountered ones. Stimuli that redun-dantly co-occurred with multiple brands had weaker influences on brand attitudes. The re-sults further suggest that differentiation operates at the learning stage during which distinct stimulus co-occurrences enjoy a processing advantage. We discuss the present findings’ theoretical and practical implications for attitude formation and identify differentiation as a possible cause of biased attitudes.

Painting all foreigners with one brush? How the salience of muslims and refugees shapes judgements

Attitudes towards foreigners are widely researched, most frequently in survey studies. However, in that context it is often unclear which attitude object respondents have in mind, and thus what their answers refer to. This paper uses a representative sample of 3,195 Germans who reported which groups they think of when thinking about foreigners living in Germany. We found that Germans disproportionately think of groups who are Muslim, and that such salience is associated with more negative attitudes towards “foreigners.” This holds true when controlling for attitudes towards Muslims; in fact, thinking of Muslim groups when thinking about foreigners moderates the relationship between anti-Muslim and anti-foreigner attitudes. The relationships were weaker when respondents think of Turks, a large and long-standing minority in Germany, suggesting an attenuation of the links through familiarity or intergroup contacts. No relationship was found between thinking of refugees and attitudes towards foreigners. Implications for research are discussed, particularly regarding the interpretation of self-reported attitudes towards foreigners and the study of populist strategies.