Wanting other attitudes: Actual–desired attitude discrepancies predict feelings of ambivalence and ambivalence consequences

Certainty in holistic thinking and responses to contradiction: Dialectical proverbs, counter-attitudinal change and ambivalence

The present research examined whether consideration of individuals' certainty in their holism can enhance the ability of this individual difference to predict how they respond to contradiction-relevant outcomes. Across four studies, participants first completed a standardized measure of holistic-analytic thinking. Then, they rated how certain they were in their responses to the holism scale or were experimentally induced to feel high or low certainty. Next, participants were exposed to dialectical proverbs (Study 1a and 1b), to a counter-attitudinal change induction (Study 2), or to a paradigm of attitudinal ambivalence (Study 3). Results revealed that participants with higher certainty in their holistic thinking exhibited higher preference for dialectical proverbs (Study 1a and 1b), changed their attitude less following a counter-attitudinal task (Study 2) and showed weaker correspondence between objective and subjective ambivalence (Study 3). Beyond examining new domains and discovering novel findings, the present work was designed to be the first to show moderation of previously identified effects in the domain of holistic thinking and responses to contradiction.

Ambivalent attitudes promote support for extreme political actions

Political extremism varies across people and contexts, but which beliefs will a person support through extreme actions? We propose that ambivalent attitudes, despite reducing normative political actions like voting, increase support for extreme political actions. We demonstrate this hypothesized reversal using dozens of measures across six studies (N = 13,055). The effect was robust to relevant covariates and numerous methodological variations and was magnified when people's attitudinal or ideological positions were more polarized. It appears to occur because being conflicted about political issues can feel psychologically uncomfortable, making extreme actions more appealing. Notably, this emerged when people thought ambivalence was justified, whereas leading them to consider ambivalence unjustified suppressed the effect, suggesting that ambivalent people are coping with but not necessarily trying to reduce their ambivalence. These results highlight the interplay of affective and cognitive influences in extreme behavior, showing that beliefs people feel justifiably conflicted about can promote extremism.

When Objective Ambivalence Predicts Subjective Ambivalence: An Affect-Cognition Matching Perspective

Understanding when people are likely to feel ambivalent is important, as ambivalence is associated with key attitude outcomes, such as attitude-behavior consistency. Interestingly, the presence of conflicting positive and negative reactions (objective ambivalence) is weakly related to feeling conflicted (subjective ambivalence). We tested a novel situation that can influence the correspondence between objective and subjective ambivalence: whether a message and a recipient's topic match in affective versus cognitive orientation. When a person encounters a message with an affective or cognitive match to the topic, conflicting reactions may be more accessible, increasing feelings of ambivalence. Across five studies, greater objective-subjective ambivalence correspondence occurred with an affective-cognitive match between message and topic orientation. Studies 4 and 5 also demonstrated that this primarily occurred when the message was counterattitudinal. This work contributes to the literature explaining the gap between measures of objective and subjective ambivalence as well as how messages can influence attitude strength properties.

Tailoring recommendation algorithms to ideal preferences makes users better off

People often struggle to do what they ideally want because of a conflict between their actual and ideal preferences. ​​​By focusing on maximizing engagement, recommendation algorithms appear to be exacerbating this struggle. However, this need not be the case. Here we show that tailoring recommendation algorithms to ideal (vs. actual) preferences would provide meaningful benefits to both users and companies. To examine this, we built algorithmic recommendation systems that generated real-time, personalized recommendations tailored to either a person's actual or ideal preferences. Then, in a high-powered, pre-registered experiment (n = 6488), we measured the effects of these recommendation algorithms. We found that targeting ideal rather than actual preferences resulted in somewhat fewer clicks, but it also increased the extent to which people felt better off and that their time was well spent. Moreover, of note to companies, targeting ideal preferences increased users' willingness to pay for the service, the extent to which they felt the company had their best interest at heart, and their likelihood of using the service again. Our results suggest that users and companies would be better off if recommendation algorithms learned what each person was striving for and nudged individuals toward their own unique ideals.

Cross-valence inhibition in forming and retrieving ambivalent attitudes

Many things in life are ambivalent, and it might sometimes be useful or necessary to ignore their positive attributes when judging their negative attributes and vice versa. Cross-valence inhibition may complicate this task, leading people to underestimate the positive and negative attributes of ambivalent stimuli. In three studies (total N = 155), participants learned to associate combined evaluative information (gains and losses) with attributes of unfamiliar objects (size and colour of Chernoff faces). Participants then estimated (Studies 1-3) or experienced and recalled (Study 3) the gains and losses associated with novel ambivalent attribute combinations. As predicted, both in estimation and recall, participants rated gains (losses) to be lower, the higher the losses (gains) associated with the stimulus. The effect occurred only when the two attributes were evaluatively conflicting (Study 2). Cross-valence inhibition might lead to maladaptive behaviour when positive and negative attributes are in fact separable in hedonic experience.

The social tensions felt within: Explaining felt ambivalence about polarized societal debates through perceived opinion discrepancies in the social environment

Within the context of polarized societal debates (e.g. abortion, racism, climate change), scholars often assume that individuals have clear-cut positions, either in favour of or against the debated issue. However, recent work suggests that such debates can also be breeding grounds for felt ambivalence. Moving beyond previous work that mainly focused on ambivalence as internal cognitive conflict, we propose and test a social discrepancy hypothesis, which suggests that the discrepancies ambivalents perceive between and within their own opinion and the opinion of actors in their social network and society (e.g. friends, family, opinion-based groups) positively explain their levels of felt ambivalence. In doing so, we quantitatively extend recent qualitative work by examining whether these social tensions are indeed felt within. To this end, we employed a multi-survey research project (Ns = 184, 181, 187) in the context of different societal debates in the Netherlands. Supporting our hypothesis across different debates, results showed that ambivalents' perceived opinion differences in the social environment explained their felt ambivalence. This suggests that polarized societal debates offer social discrepancies that, for ambivalents at least, can facilitate an internalization of social tensions.

Neighborhood disadvantage is associated with biological aging: Intervention-induced enhancement of couple functioning confers resilience

The accelerated pace of biological aging predicts mortality and morbidity later in life. The current study examines whether a change in supportive couple functioning buffers accelerated aging associated with stressful community environments among Black Americans who live in rural, Southern, disadvantaged neighborhoods. We examined 348 Black American middle-aged adults assigned randomly to receive the Protecting Strong African American Families (ProSAAF) intervention or a control condition. The program was designed to enhance supportive couple functioning among Black Americans. We used DunedinPoAm to quantify the methylation pace of aging and employed the Area Deprivation Index at the census block group level to measure neighborhood disadvantage. Neighborhood disadvantage was associated with the accelerated pace of aging. Further, participation in ProSAAF enhanced supportive couple functioning, and improvement in couple functioning protected participants from the harmful effects of neighborhood disadvantage on the accelerated pace of aging. These findings supported mediated moderation and suggested that family-based prevention programs that enhance couple support may decrease the erosive effects of neighborhood disadvantage and improve prospects for healthy aging among rural, Southern, Black Americans living in difficult circumstances. This may provide a supplemental strategy for decreasing health disparities due to neighborhood disadvantage by enhancing family systems.

Facilitating Scientific Communication Between Strangers: A Preregistered Lost E-Mail Experiment

Communication scholars are increasingly concerned about biases that shape people's interactions with science. Past study has focused on echo chambers (cultivating social networks that reinforce existing worldviews). People's facilitation of scientific discourse between strangers also may be shaped by their attitudes. To study the latter, we employed a recent adaptation of Milgram's lost letter technique called the lost e-mail technique (LET). We conducted a preregistered field study using a large undergraduate university sample (N = 1,508) to examine how the LET might elucidate people's treatment of scientific information. We distributed four ostensibly misaddressed scientific messages and monitored the likelihood of these e-mails being facilitated by participants. Participants' beliefs about self-esteem's importance, assessed months earlier, were associated with increased facilitation of scientific claims congruent with (vs. incongruent with) these beliefs. Thus, people shape the spread of online information in a manner matching their beliefs, even for people outside their social networks.

The role of dialecticism in objective and subjective attitudinal ambivalence

Although attitudes are often considered positive or negative evaluations, people often have both positive and negative associations with a target object or issue, and when people are ambivalent, they are typically presumed to find the experience aversive because they are motivated to hold clear, univalent attitudes. Cross-cultural research, however, has shown cultural variation in the propensity for dialectical thinking, which is characterized by a tolerance for contradiction. Two studies examined the role of dialectical thinking tendencies in the occurrence of attitudinal ambivalence and how much people subjectively experience their state of ambivalence. Study 1 measured individual differences in dialectical thinking within a culture, and Study 2 compared participants across two cultures (United States and Taiwan) that differ in dialecticism. Across studies, greater dialectical thinking was associated with holding both positive and negative evaluations of the same topic (objective ambivalence) and weaker correlations between objective ambivalence and subjective reports of being conflicted (subjective ambivalence).

Toward the dialectical evaluation of online information: the roles of personality, self-efficacy and attitude

Purpose

User behavior in online information evaluation is the result of a multitude of factors related to social, cultural, personal and psychological issues. The present study aimed to examine the effects of three important psychological variables including personality, self-efficacy and attitude on online information evaluation.

Design/methodology/approach

Four validated measures were administrated in person and online among 355 postgraduate students at Shahed University, Tehran, Iran. For testing the possible relationships among the variables, the reliability, normality and Pearson correlation tests were performed by using SPSS 24.0. Moreover, to test the ten hypotheses of the research, the structural equation modeling was considered using AMOS 26.0.

Findings

The findings confirmed the first five research hypotheses indicating the direct positive relationships among the four variables except for the impact of self-efficacy on attitude. The mediated effects of the variables were not supported except for the mediating role of attitude in the impact of personality on online evaluation behavior. The variable personality was found to be fundamental among the tested paths because it influenced the information evaluation behavior, both directly and indirectly.

Originality/value

The study showed the impacts of the three variables, which demonstrates that online information evaluation is greatly affected by psychological factors.

The interactive effects of ambivalence and certainty on political opinion stability

Some political attitudes and opinions shift and fluctuate over time whereas others remain fairly stable. Prior research on attitude strength has documented several features of attitudes that predict their temporal stability. The present analysis focuses on two of them: attitudinal ambivalence and certainty. Each of these variables has received mixed support for its relationship with attitude stability. A recent set of studies, however, has addressed this link by showing that ambivalence and certainty interact to predict stability. Because those studies relied exclusively on college student samples and considered issues that may have been especially likely to evince change over time, the present analysis aimed to replicate the original findings in a sample of registered Florida voters with an important politically relevant issue: abortion. Results of these analyses replicated the previous findings and support the generalizability of the ambivalence × certainty interaction on attitude stability to a sample of registered voters reporting their attitudes toward abortion. Implications for public opinion and the psychology of political attitudes are discussed.

Consumer acceptance of personalised nutrition: The role of ambivalent feelings and eating context

Providing dietary suggestions based on an individual's nutritional needs may contribute to the prevention of non-communicable dietary related diseases. Consumer acceptance is crucial for the success of these personalised nutrition services. The current study aims to build on previous studies by exploring whether ambivalent feelings and contextual factors could help to further explain consumers' usage intentions regarding personalised nutrition services. An online administered survey was conducted in December 2016 with a final sample of 797 participants in the Netherlands. Different models were tested and compared by means of structural equation modelling. The final model indicated that the result of weighing personalisation benefits and privacy risks (called the risk-benefit calculus) is positively related to the intention to use personalised nutrition advice, suggesting a more positive intention when more benefits than risks are perceived. Additionally, the model suggests that more ambivalent feelings are related to a lower intention to use personalised nutrition advice. Finally, we found that the more the eating context is perceived as a barrier to use personalised nutrition advice, the more ambivalent feelings are perceived. In conclusion, the current study suggests the additional value of ambivalent feelings as an affective construct, and eating context as a possible barrier in predicting consumers' intention to use personalised nutrition advice. This implies that personalised nutrition services may need to address affective concerns and consider an individual's eating context.

An Examination of Whether Mindfulness Can Predict the Relationship Between Objective and Subjective Attitudinal Ambivalence

Ambivalence is a mixed reaction toward an attitudinal object. Ambivalence is often viewed as aversive and people are motivated to reduce it. However, the presence of both strong positive and negative attitudes toward an object (objective ambivalence; OA) does not always lead to consciously experienced conflicted and torn feelings (subjective ambivalence; SA) or psychological discomfort. We hypothesized that the way people think about their inner experience can affect whether ambivalent attitudes lead to increased conflicted feelings. In five studies, we examined whether mindfulness predicts the relationship between objective and subjective ambivalence. We predicted that the acceptance aspect of mindfulness would attenuate the relationship between OA and SA, based on the idea that acceptance makes people more tolerant and less judgmental toward their inner states in general (and OA in particular). Although some findings across five studies were consistent with the prediction showing that acceptance attenuated the OA–SA relationship, other findings were not and even showed that acceptance strengthened the OA–SA relationship. A meta-analysis of the interaction effect across all studies failed to find support for predictions (r = -0.036 and 95% CI [-0.087; 0.022]). We discuss possible reasons for these mixed findings, and the implications of these studies.

Is the Ambivalence a Sign of the Multiple-Self Nature of the Human Being? Interdisciplinary Remarks

Ambivalence is a constituent feature of human beings. The aim of this article is to systematise the fundamental sources of ambivalence (neuropsychic, socio-cultural and situational) and highlight that ambivalence can be considered as an external sign or manifestation of a complex and multiple internal human nature; that is, a human being constituted by multiple selves. In this paper the self is viewed as a principle of organization and integration for action, that is, as a complex neurological process and not as a static entity. The purpose is to show how by assuming ambivalence and the multiple-self, social and anthropological theories can offer a more realistic view of human beings.

Unskilled and unaware in the classroom: College students' desired grades predict their biased grade predictions

People tend to be overconfident when predicting their performance on a variety of physical and mental tasks (i.e., they predict they will perform better than they actually do). Such a pattern is commonly found in educational settings, in which many students greatly overestimate how well they will perform on exams. In particular, the lowest-performing students tend to show the greatest overconfidence (i.e., the "unskilled-and-unaware" effect). Such overconfidence can have deleterious effects on the efficacy of students' short-term study behaviors (i.e., underpreparing for exams) and long-term academic decisions (i.e., changing one's academic major to an "easier" topic or dropping out of school completely). To help understand why students' grade predictions are often overconfident, we examined the hypothesis that students' grade predictions are biased by their desired levels of performance, which are often much higher than their actual levels of performance. Across three studies in which actual students made predictions about their exam performance in their courses, we demonstrated that students' grade predictions are highly biased by their desired grades on those exams. We obtained this result when students predicted their exam grades over a week before the exam (Study 1), immediately after taking the exam (Study 2), and across the four course exams in a single semester (Study 3). These results are informative for understanding why the "unskilled-and-unaware" pattern of performance predictions occurs, and why people in general tend to be overconfident when making both physical and mental performance predictions.

On the Attitudinal Consequences of Being Mindful

A series of studies examined whether mindfulness is associated with the experience of attitudinal ambivalence. Studies 1A and 1B found that mindful individuals expressed greater comfort holding ambivalent views and reported feeling ambivalent less often. More mindful individuals also responded more positively to feelings of uncertainty (as assessed in Study 1B). Study 2 replicated these effects and demonstrated that mindful individuals had lower objective and subjective ambivalence across a range of attitude objects but did not differ in attitude valence, extremity, positivity/negativity, strength, or the need to evaluate. Study 3 showed that the link between greater ambivalence and negative affect was buffered by mindfulness, such that there was no link between the amount of ambivalence and negative affect among more mindful individuals. The results are discussed with respect to the benefits of mindfulness in relation to ambivalence and affect.

I Am Aware of My Inconsistencies but Can Tolerate Them: The Effect of High Quality Listening on Speakers' Attitude Ambivalence

We examined how listeners characterized by empathy and a non-judgmental approach affect speakers' attitude structure. We hypothesized that high quality listening decreases speakers' social anxiety, which in turn reduces defensive processing. This reduction in defensive processing was hypothesized to result in an awareness of contradictions (increased objective-attitude ambivalence), and decreased attitude extremity. Moreover, we hypothesized that experiencing high quality listening would enable speakers to tolerate contradictory responses, such that listening would attenuate the association between objective- and subjective-attitude ambivalence. We obtained consistent support for our hypotheses across four laboratory experiments that manipulated listening experience in different ways on a range of attitude topics. The effects of listening on objective-attitude ambivalence were stronger for higher dispositional social anxiety and initial objective-attitude ambivalence (Study 4). Overall, the results suggest that speakers' attitude structure can be changed by a heretofore unexplored interpersonal variable: merely providing high quality listening.

Wanting to Be Different Predicts Nonmotivated Change: Actual-Desired Self-Discrepancies and Susceptibility to Subtle Change Inductions

Actual-desired discrepancies in people's self-concepts represent structural incongruities in their self-representations that can lead people to experience subjective conflict. Theory and research suggest that structural incongruities predict susceptibility to subtle influences like priming and conditioning. Although typically examined for their motivational properties, we hypothesized that because self-discrepancies represent structural incongruities in people's self-concepts, they should also predict susceptibility to subtle influences on people's active self-views. Across three studies, we found that subtle change inductions (self-evaluative conditioning and priming) exerted greater impact on active self-perceptions and behavior as actual-desired self-discrepancies increased in magnitude. Exploratory analyses suggested that these changes occurred regardless of the compatibility of the change induction with individuals' desired self-views.

On the Dominance of Attitude Emotionality

Many situations in our lives require us to make relatively quick decisions as whether to approach or avoid a person or object, buy or pass on a product, or accept or reject an offer. These decisions are particularly difficult when there are both positive and negative aspects to the object. How do people go about navigating this conflict to come to a summary judgment? Using the Evaluative Lexicon (EL), we demonstrate across three studies, 7,700 attitude expressions, and nearly 50 different attitude objects that when positivity and negativity conflict, the valence that is based more on emotion is more likely to dominate. Furthermore, individuals are also more consistent in the expression of their univalent summary judgments when they involve greater emotionality. In sum, valence that is based on emotion tends to dominate when resolving ambivalence and also helps individuals to remain consistent when offering quick judgments.

Behind the stage of deliberate self-persuasion: When changes in valence of associations to an attitude object predict attitude change

Modern theory and research on evaluative processes, combined with a comprehensive review of deliberate self-persuasion (Maio & Thomas, 2007, Pers. Soc. Psychol. Bull., 11, 46), suggest two types of strategies people can use to construct new, more desired attitudes. Epistemic strategies change the perceived valence of associations activated by the attitude object. Teleologic strategies, in contrast, keep undesired associations from being activated in the first place, thus obviating the need to change their perceived valence. Change in perceived valence of associations therefore might predict attitude change better when people pursue epistemic than teleologic strategies for deliberate self-persuasion. This hypothesis gained convergent support from three studies in which use of epistemic versus teleologic strategies was measured as an individual difference (Study 1) and manipulated (studies 2 and 3). The results of these studies supported the theoretical distinction between the two strategies and suggested further research directions.

Reducing Subjective Ambivalence by Creating Doubt

Ambivalence, the presence of positive and negative reactions toward an object, typically involves the subjective experience of conflict. We investigate the role that the perceived validity of each side of an ambivalent attitude plays in producing subjective ambivalence (SA). Consistent with the metacognitive model of attitudes, we demonstrated that SA is reduced when people doubt either the positive or the negative reactions. Thus, inducing doubt (in one side) can reduce SA. We further explored whether viewing both sides as invalid would lead to relatively low or to relatively high levels of SA. Consistent with the idea that equivalent perceived validity increases the difficulty of ambivalence reduction, when both sides were doubted, conflict was as high as when both sides were validated.

On Feeling Torn About One's Sexuality: The Effects of Explicit-Implicit Sexual Orientation Ambivalence

Three studies offer novel evidence addressing the consequences of explicit–implicit sexual orientation (SO) ambivalence. In Study 1, self-identified straight females completed explicit and implicit measures of SO. The results revealed that participants with greater SO ambivalence took longer responding to explicit questions about their sexual preferences, an effect moderated by the direction of ambivalence. Study 2 replicated this effect using a different paradigm. Study 3 included self-identified straight and gay female and male participants; participants completed explicit and implicit measures of SO, plus measures of self-esteem and affect regarding their SO. Among straight participants, the response time results replicated the findings of Studies 1 and 2. Among gay participants, trends suggested that SO ambivalence influenced time spent deliberating on explicit questions relevant to sexuality, but in a different way. Furthermore, the amount and direction of SO ambivalence was related to self-esteem.