Attitudes Based on Feelings: Fixed or Fleeting?

Abstract

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.

Attitude Strength: What’s New?

“…Perhaps the earliest indication that strong attitudes could be changed with a particular type of appeal came from work on influencing cognitively versus affectively based attitudes. Recall, that contemporary research suggests that attitudes based primarily on emotion tend to be stronger than attitudes based primarily on cognition (Giner-Sorolla, 2004; Rocklage & Luttrell, 2021). This would indicate that the generic persuasive message, which typically uses persuasive arguments, should work better on attitudes that were primarily cognitively rather than affectively-based.…”

“…Another dimension is whether the attitude is more based on affect or cognition. Although this is a long-studied feature of attitudes (e.g., Rosenberg & Hovland, 1960), it is only relatively recent evidence that suggests it is a strength property (e.g., affectively based attitudes are more accessible and less likely to change over time than cognitively based attitudes; Giner-Sorolla, 2004; Rocklage & Luttrell, 2021). Three other dimensions that are gaining traction as strength properties include whether the attitude is self-defining, linked to one’s identity, or based more in negativity than positivity.…”

A New Explanation for the Attitude-Behavior Inconsistency Based on the Contextualized Attitude

“…When the motivation level of the explicit attitude is low, individuals will take actions that are inconsistent with it [ 22 , 23 , 24 ]. Secondly, the Tripartite Model of Attitude Structure viewpoint suggests that attitude consists of cognition, emotion, and intention, and the consistency of evaluation among these components should be taken into consideration when examining the relationship between attitude and behavior [ 1 , 13 , 25 ]. Thirdly, the concept of attitude strength proposes that strong attitudes will affect the selection and processing of information, impede attitude changes, and influence the duration of attitude, thus exhibiting better behavior prediction ability [ 26 , 27 , 28 ].…”

Believing and social interactions: effects on bodily expressions and personal narratives

“…For example, positively valenced stimuli improve prospective memory performance such that events with a strong emotional loading can be retrieved from memory more vividly than neutral events (Hostler et al, 2018 ; Kensinger and Ford, 2020 ). In addition, in empirical studies with more than 20,000 individuals, it was found that attitudes based on emotions were relatively fixed and decayed less over time if the emotions were positive (Rocklage and Luttrell, 2021 ). Thus, the emotional loading of the inherently ambiguous information about objects and events enhances the probability of its encoding as a personal imagination in memory.…”