Attitude strength: Distinguishing predictors versus defining features

2021

Psychol Sci

Self Cite

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.

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Attitudes Based on Feelings: Fixed or Fleeting?

Rocklage

2021

Psychol Sci

Self Cite

“…Finally, it may surprise some readers that other strength-related attitude attributes such as ambivalence and importance did not emerge as robust predictors of attitude stability. Although these variables are often described as reliable predictors of attitude strength, prior evidence has been mixed, and these variables’ effects on attitude strength are often moderated by other features of the attitude or situation (see Luttrell & Sawicki, in press). Nevertheless, even though attitude certainty has sometimes failed to predict attitude stability (e.g., Craig et al, 2005), we find pretty consistent evidence for its role in predicting stable attitudes.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Much of the research on attitude stability has been conducted within the context of the attitude strength literature. Strong attitudes are those that influence thoughts and action and remain durable over time and in the face of persuasive information (Krosnick & Petty, 1995; Luttrell & Sawicki, in press). Past research has identified myriad variables that predict an attitude’s strength, including how important an attitude is (Eaton & Visser, 2008), how much someone recognizes both positive and negative qualities of the object (i.e., “ambivalence”; Armitage & Conner, 2000), and how confident someone is about their attitude (Tormala & Rucker, 2018).…”

Section: Attitude Stabilitymentioning

confidence: 99%

The Stability of Moralized Attitudes Over Time

Togans

2020

Pers Soc Psychol Bull

Self Cite

When people perceive a moral basis for an attitude, that attitude tends to remain durable when directly challenged. But are moral concerns only influential in the moment or does moralization also signal an attitude that endures over time? Five longitudinal studies considering attitudes toward 19 different topics tested whether attitudes are more stable over time when people report that they are more morally based. Across studies, we find support for the hypothesis that degree of attitude moralization moderates the consistency of attitude reports over time with more moralized attitudes being more stable. These effects of moralization also hold when controlling for other metacognitive predictors of attitude strength, including certainty, ambivalence, importance, knowledge, ease of retrieval, and self-definition. An analysis of all studies together supports the reliability of the hypothesized effect but also suggests that it varies by topic. Implications for models of attitude moralization and attitude strength are discussed.

“…A person's attitude toward a product or service (i.e., his or her summary evaluation) has long been shown to reliably predict behavior and intentions, especially when that attitude is strong (Luttrell & Sawicki, 2020;Petty & Krosnick, 1995). One reliable way to identify strong attitudes is to measure people's metacognitive assessments of their attitudes (Fabrigar, Wegener, & MacDonald, 2009), where metacognition refers to people's evaluations or perceived qualities of their own thoughts (Petty, Briñol, Tormala, & Wegener, 2007).…”

Section: Attitude Moralizationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Morality Matters in the Marketplace: The Role of Moral Metacognition in Consumer Purchasing

Teeny²,

Petty

2021

Social Cognition

Self Cite

To better understand the seemingly inconsistent influence of consumers' morality on their marketplace behaviors, we apply insights from research on attitude moralization to the consumer domain. That is, rather than predefining certain products as “moral,” this approach treats morality as the extent to which individual consumers metacognitively perceive their positive product attitudes as rooted in moral (vs. non-moral) considerations. Across multiple studies (N = 1,105), a wide variety of product categories, and multiple methodological approaches (i.e., correlational, experimental, and longitudinal), we show how the degree to which consumers perceive a moral basis for their product attitudes robustly predicts their intended and actual marketplace behaviors. Importantly, these findings hold above and beyond overall attitudes, other metacognitive assessments (e.g., certainty and ambivalence), and explicit product quality. By extending prior research in moral social cognition to the consumer domain, we provide a more refined account of morality's role in consumer behavior.