On the generalization of attitude accessibility after repeated attitude expression

Abstract

The more accessible an attitude is, the stronger is its influence on information processing and behavior. Accessibility can be increased through attitude rehearsal, but it remains unknown whether attitude rehearsal also affects the accessibility of related attitudes. To investigate this hypothesis, participants in an experimental condition repeatedly expressed their attitudes towards exemplars of several semantic categories during an evaluative categorization task. Participants in a control condition performed a non‐evaluative task with the same exemplars and evaluated unrelated attitude objects. After a 30‐minute interval, participants in the experimental condition were faster than controls to evaluate not only the original exemplars but also novel exemplars of the same categories. This finding suggests that the effect of attitude rehearsal on accessibility generalizes to attitudes towards untrained but semantically related attitude objects. © 2016 The Authors. European Journal of Social Psychology published by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Conditional secondary transfer effect: The moderating role of moral credentials and prejudice

“…In regard to the STE of positive contact, we investigated whether a moral act, that is, choosing the best qualified job applicant with an immigrant origin, would result in moral licensing among prejudiced individuals, thereby limiting the positive effect of contact to attitudes towards the primary outgroup only (i.e., inhibiting the generalization of the positive effects of positive intergroup contact). In contrast, moral credentials among those with lower initial prejudice would serve as a means to increase expectancy-based attitude accessibility (Descheemaeker et al, 2017) and thus to show moral consistency or reinforcement (H2a).…”

What Do Female and Male College Students from Saudi Arabia Think of a Green Economy?

“…They all agreed that ensuring information dissemination in the student population was key (Bettinghaus, 1986;Davidson et al, 1985). Indeed, one property of an attitude or belief that makes it a good predictor of behavior is its accessibility, which mostly depends on rehearsal (Descheemaeker et al, 2017). Thus, one of the targets of discussion was the curriculum of different academic majors to foster a deeper and broader understanding of suitability and its practical implications.…”