Ambivalence, the Person and the Attitude Object:  Individual Differences in the Experience of Ambivalence

Jjp, Simons; Schneider, Iris K.; Sanchez-Burks, Jeffrey

doi:10.31234/osf.io/f7tvd

Cited by 7 publications

(8 citation statements)

References 11 publications

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“…Interestingly, we found that individuals who were more ambivalent across various brands also showed more change in their attitudes over time. This pattern is consistent with ambivalence as a sign of weaker attitudes but is intriguing because it occurs at the level of the individual (Britt et al, 2011; Simons, Schneider, & Sanchez-Burks, 2019). Because many studies in the attitude-strength literature tend to measure one attitude at a time, they confound attitude attributes that are specific to a given target with individual propensities to hold attitudes with those attributes.…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 76%

Attitudes Based on Feelings: Fixed or Fleeting?

Rocklage

Luttrell

2021

Psychol Sci

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Researchers and practitioners want to create opinions that stick. Yet whereas some opinions stay fixed, others are as fleeting as the time it takes to report them. In seven longitudinal studies with more than 20,000 individuals, we found that attitudes based more on emotion are relatively fixed. Whether participants evaluated brand-new Christmas gifts or one of 40 brands, the more emotional their opinion, the less it changed over time, particularly if it was positive. In a word-of-mouth linguistic analysis of 75,000 real-world online reviews, we found that the more emotional consumers are in their first review, the more that attitude persists when they express it again even years later. Finally, more emotion-evoking persuasive messages create attitudes that decay less over time, further establishing emotion’s causal effect. These effects persist above and beyond other attitude-strength attributes. Interestingly, we also found that lay individuals generally fail to appreciate the relation between emotionality and attitude stability.

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Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 76%

Attitudes Based on Feelings: Fixed or Fleeting?

Rocklage

Luttrell

2021

Psychol Sci

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“…More recently, these findings were extended by work using multi-level modeling approaches, a larger dataset, and a wider range of attitude objects. In this study, interindividual differences accounted for 16%-28% of the variance in state ambivalence over all included attitude objects (Simons et al, 2020). These findings demonstrate that differences in ambivalence reflect a general tendency to be more ambivalent over situations and attitude objects.…”

Section: Introductionsupporting

confidence: 52%

“…So far, this work has focused on state ambivalence, an experience that emerges in response to a specific stimulus. However, there is evidence indications that there are also stable individual differences in ambivalence (Simons et al, 2020;. That is, some people are chronically more ambivalent than others.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Benefits of Being Ambivalent: The Relationship between Trait Ambivalence and Attribution Biases

Schneider¹,

Novin²,

Harreveld³

et al. 2020

Preprint

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Ambivalence refers to the experience of having both positive and negative thoughts and feelings at the same time about the same object, person, or issue. Although ambivalence research has focused extensively on negative consequences, recently, scholars turned their lens to the positive effects of ambivalence, demonstrating beneficial effects on judgments and decision-making processes. So far, this work has focused on state ambivalence, which is ambivalence as a direct response to a specific stimulus. However, there are substantial individual differences in ambivalence: some people are just more ambivalent than others. Taking a first step in understanding how these individual differences relate to judgment and decision-making, we examine the relationship between trait ambivalence and cognitive bias in social judgments tasks. Specifically, we look at two of the most pervasive and consequential attribution biases in person perception: correspondence bias and self-serving bias. We find a negative relationship between trait ambivalence and correspondence bias. The higher individuals are in trait ambivalence, the smaller their bias towards attributing behavior to a person’s disposition (Study 1A and B). We find the same for self-serving bias (Study 2A and B). In sum, we show that trait ambivalence is negatively related to cognitive bias in person perception.

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“…So far, this work has focused on state ambivalence, an experience that emerges in response to a specific stimulus. However, there is evidence that there are also stable individual differences in ambivalence (Simons et al ., 2020; Thompson & Zanna, 1995). That is, some people are chronically more ambivalent than others.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…More recently, these findings were extended by work using multi‐level modelling approaches, a larger data set, and a wider range of attitude objects. In this study, interindividual differences accounted for 16%–28% of the variance in state ambivalence over all included attitude objects (Simons et al ., 2020). These findings demonstrate that differences in ambivalence reflect a general tendency to be more ambivalent over situations and attitude objects.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Benefits of being ambivalent: The relationship between trait ambivalence and attribution biases

Schneider

Novin

Harreveld

et al. 2020

British J Social Psychol

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Ambivalence refers to the experience of having both positive and negative thoughts and feelings at the same time about the same object, person, or issue. Although ambivalence research has focused extensively on negative consequences, recently, scholars turned their lens to the positive effects of ambivalence, demonstrating beneficial effects on judgements and decision-making processes. So far, this work has focused on state ambivalence, which is ambivalence as a direct response to a specific stimulus. However, there are substantial individual differences in ambivalence: Some people are just more ambivalent than others. Taking a first step in understanding how these individual differences relate to judgement and decision-making, we examine the relationship between trait ambivalence and cognitive bias in social judgements tasks. Specifically, we look at two of the most pervasive and consequential attribution biases in person perception: correspondence bias and self-serving bias. We find a negative relationship between trait ambivalence and correspondence bias. The higher individuals are in trait ambivalence, the smaller their bias towards attributing behaviour to a person's disposition (Study 1A and B). We find the same for self-serving bias (Study 2A and B). In sum, we show that trait ambivalence is negatively related to cognitive bias in person perception. In everyday life, people often encounter situations in which they have mixed feelings (Trampe et al., 2015). For instance, people can love a pecan pie for its great taste, while disliking it at the same time because of its high-calorie content. This experience, having both positive and negative thoughts and feelings at the same time, is called ambivalence

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Ambivalence, the Person and the Attitude Object: Individual Differences in the Experience of Ambivalence

Cited by 7 publications

References 11 publications

Attitudes Based on Feelings: Fixed or Fleeting?

Attitudes Based on Feelings: Fixed or Fleeting?

Benefits of Being Ambivalent: The Relationship between Trait Ambivalence and Attribution Biases

Benefits of being ambivalent: The relationship between trait ambivalence and attribution biases

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