Cross-Racial Appraisal as Related to Attitude Ambivalence and Cognitive Complexity

Abstract

Previous research has suggested that Whites' evaluations of Blacks who are presented positively or negatively tend to be more extreme than evaluations of similar White targets. In Study 1, White subjects rated a Black or White confederate who was responsible for success or failure at a joint task. There was a clear cross-race polarization of evaluations. Study 2 tested two possible explanations of the polarization phenomenon-the authors' ambivalence formulation and Linville and Jones's cognitive complexity hypothesis. As hypothesized, ambivalence was directly related to favorability of impression ratings in the success condition. In the failure condition, the correlation was in the predicted inverse direction but was not significant. The difference between the two correlations, as expected, was significant. No support was obtained for the cognitive complexity hypothesis. Rather, in the failure condition complexity was directly related to the unfavorability of ratings, contrary to the hypothesis.

Self‐ambivalence and reactions to success versus failure

“…4 The effect of structural self-ambivalence regarding cognitive self-evaluations extends previous research on the ambivalence amplification hypothesis. This research showed that people with strongly (vs. weakly) ambivalent attitudes toward social groups (e.g., Bell & Esses, 1997;Gibbons et al, 1980;Hass et al, 1991;MacDonald & Zanna, 1998;Maio et al, 1996) or toward consumer goods (Jonas et al, 1997) change their evaluations of these targets more strongly after receiving positive or negative information about them. Our study is the first to provide evidence of similar effects in the domain of self-evaluation.…”

“…For example, people with ambivalent attitudes toward Blacks should be more willing to help a friendly Black person than an unfriendly Black person or should find the friendly Black more likeable than the unfriendly Black; these differences in responses should be weaker or absent for persons with nonambivalent attitudes toward Blacks. Support for the ambivalence amplification hypothesis has been obtained for several attitude objects (mostly, stigmatized groups such as Blacks, handicapped people, feminists, Native people) and across a wide range of response types (e.g., evaluative judgments concerning the attitude object; helping; intention to hire a member of a certain group in a fictitious job application scenario; administration of electric shocks; e.g., Bell & Esses, 1997, 2002Gibbons, Stephan, Stephenson, & Petty, 1980;Hass, Katz, Rizzo, Bailey, & Eisenstadt, 1991;Jonas, Diehl, & Broemer, 1997;MacDonald & Zanna, 1998;Maio, Bell, & Esses, 1996).…”

Ambivalence toward a country and consumers’ willingness to buy emblematic brands: The differential predictive validity of objective and subjective ambivalence measures on behavior

“…In fact, research on ambivalence has spawned from the realization that traditional measures of attitudes could not distinguish between people who are conflicted between two sides of an issue (ambivalence) and people who do not care either way (indifference); both would indicate the middle scale point on common bipolar unidimensional scales rating from weak to strong. This led to the suggestion that positive and negative opinions about an object should be assessed separately, and indeed, across many studies, positive and negative evaluations were found to cluster separately and form two factors with a small negative correlation (Thompson et al 1995) and, in some domains, such as racial attitudes, no correlation at all (e.g., Has et al 1991). …”

Ambivalence and Persuasion: The Processing of Messages about Immigrant Groups

“…The ambivalence scores calculated using this formula are a linear function of the scores calculated using the formula recently proposed and validated by for use with closed-ended measures. Unlike other formulae for calculating ambivalence (e.g., Hass, Katz, Rizzo, Bailey, & Eisenstadt, 1991;Kaplan, 1972), our formula produces a score that is a direct function of the extent to which the dimensions of people's attitudes contain conflicting vs nonconflicting elements (see , for the derivation of the formula).…”