The Temporal Dynamics of Attitudinal Conflict in Daily Life: An Experience Sampling Study of Conflict Emergence and Resolution

Abstract

Although attitudinal conflict is a pervasive aspect of everyday decision-making, little is known about the temporal dynamics that characterize how people experience and resolve such conflict. The present research investigated attitudinal conflict by adopting a temporal framework of conflict emergence and resolution. We conducted a preregistered experience sampling study in the domain of meat consumption and employed a novel integrated sampling approach (of a total of 18,586 observations from 462 participants), achieving precise temporal resolution throughout the entire course of natural decision-making processes in daily life. The data revealed an episodic structure of attitudinal conflict, highlighting a complex trajectory across multiple phases. Especially when people engaged in decision-making, the cognitive accessibility of evaluative inconsistency (i.e., attitudinal ambivalence) elicited conflict. Although these experiences emerged situationally, they tended to fade gradually. People downregulated attitudinal conflict more strongly when they ate meat despite previously evaluating it negatively (i.e., cognitive dissonance). However, this decline was only temporary, and the conflict resurged. Furthermore, people engaged in dissonance reduction by initially denying responsibility for eating meat and subsequently aligning their attitudes. The findings elucidate the situational dynamics and sequential processes underlying how people struggle with conflicted choices and rationalize them in everyday life. Furthermore, given that our sampling method offers fine-grained insights into the entire decision-making process, it can be applied to various research questions and applications, such as to inform the optimal timing of behavior change campaigns.

Attitude-Based Self-Regulation: An Experience Sampling Study on the Role of Attitudes in the Experience and Resolution of Self-Control Conflicts in the Context of Vegetarians

“…In fact, it is not only the mere existence of equally strong positive and negative attitudes that determines conflict magnitude; the magnitude of conflict increase when these attitude components are simultaneously accessible (McGregor et al, 2019). That is, felt ambivalence is experienced more strongly the faster people recall both their positive and negative evaluations and the stronger people report to elaborate on it (Itzchakov et al, 2020;Newby-Clark et al, 2002;Pauer et al, 2024). As attitudes inform people about their goals, we thus argue that strong and simultaneously accessible ambivalent attitudes elicit self-control conflicts: They inform people that an attitude object, such as a donut, aligns with their hedonic goals (to eat tasty food) and elicit corresponding cognitive, affective, and behavioral reactions, for instance the desire to approach the donut; however, they also inform them that the donut does not align with long-term goal (to stay slim and healthy) and elicit according responses such as restraint and avoidance.…”

“…However, attitude change presumably happens incrementally over multiple consistent decisions (Buttlar, Pauer, & Harreveld, 2023), which might have made it difficult to observe these effects within the current study in which we only investigated the most intense conflict, reported at the end of each day. Thus, future research could rely on more fine-grained analyses that assess the effects of self-regulatory strategies more generally and attitude regulation more specifically over time (see, for instance, Pauer et al, 2024).…”

Disentangling the Meat Paradox: A Comparative Review of Meat-Related Ambivalence and Dissonance

“…Pauer et al (2022) showed that omnivores' felt ambivalence (but not potential ambivalence) increases when asking them to recall personally held positive and negative evaluations towards meat. A recent experience sampling suggests that everyday fluctuations in potential ambivalence about meat elicit felt ambivalence over time, especially during food choice (Pauer et al, 2024). In fact, Buttlar and Walther (2018) showed that meat-related ambivalence is reflected in people's movements when deciding whether different meat dishes are positive or negative.…”

“…This includes information seeking on meat avoidance, presumably to facilitate behavioral change (Buttlar, Pauer, Ruby, et al, 2023;Pauer et al, 2022Pauer et al, , 2023. These motivational consequences might arise due to the high recurrence of meat-related ambivalence in omnivores (Pauer et al, 2023(Pauer et al, , 2024. In this way, people might reconcile their ambivalent attitude and overcome barriers to behavior change, such as the habit of meat consumption (Rees et al, 2018), as well as enhance the anticipated benefits of meat-free eating (de Boer & Aiking, 2017).…”

“…For these reasons, omnivores who experience meat-related cognitive dissonance most often try to justify and maintain their diets instead of considering behavioral change (Bastian & Loughnan, 2017;Pauer et al, 2024). In a similar vein, for veg*ans who commit to eating meat and thereby violate their diet, it is too late to reverse the decision.…”