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Attitudes play a fundamental role in many aspects of social psychology, but researchers have long recognized that attitudes vary in their susceptibility to change and their influence on behavior and cognitive processes. This insight lies at the heart of attitude strength, which is defined as an attitude's durability and impact. A variety of attitude attributes such as certainty and ambivalence have been shown to correlate with these aspects of attitude strength, which has made for some confusion as to what variables define strong attitudes versus predict an attitude's strength. In this article, we highlight this distinction between predictors and defining features of strength and review recent programs of research demonstrating the independence of strength‐related attitude attributes and attitude strength itself. Specifically, although some attitude attributes are associated with the attitude's durability and impact, there are conditions under which those attributes fail to predict attitude strength or even have the opposite effects. Throughout, this review reveals nuances in the attitude strength literature and provokes new questions for future inquiry.

To date, little research has examined the impact of attitudinal ambivalence on attitude-congruent selective exposure. Past research would suggest that strong/univalent rather than weak/ambivalent attitudes should be more predictive of proattitudinal information seeking. Although ambivalent attitude structure might weaken the attitude's effect on seeking proattitudinal information, we believe that conflicted attitudes might also motivate attitude-congruent selective exposure because proattitudinal information should be effective in reducing ambivalence. Two studies provide evidence that the effects of ambivalence on information choices depend on amount of issue knowledge. That is, ambivalence motivates attitude-consistent exposure when issue knowledge is relatively low because less familiar information is perceived to be effective at reducing ambivalence. Conversely, when knowledge is relatively high, more unambivalent (univalent) attitudes predicted attitude-consistent information seeking.

Esta es la versión de autor del artículo publicado en: This is an author produced version of a paper published in: El acceso a la versión del editor puede requerir la suscripción del recurso Access to the published version may require subscription AUTHOR QUERY FORM ArticleWhen encountering persuasive messages, people can engage in many different strategies and rely on many different types of information as a basis for their opinions (for reviews, see Petty & Wegener, 1998;Wegener & Carlston, 2005). In the persuasion literature, a great deal of research has focused on the amount of processing motivation and ability as a key determinant of the different ways that influence can occur. However, even when motivation and ability are high (for example), different orientations at the time of message receipt could guide the way processing unfolds. With this in mind, the current research compares a focus on evaluating the merits of a persuasive message versus the merits of a persuasive source. For example, consider a citizen receiving a message about a highly relevant proposed policy at one of two different times: during the lead-up to an election or a year later. When receiving the appeal prior to voting, the citizen may likely process the advocacy as a way to evaluate the candidate. However, when receiving the message at a time when no decision about the politician is imminent (e.g., after the politician is ensconced in the position), the citizen may be more likely to scrutinize it as a way to evaluate the policy itself. Thus, across these situations, evaluation of the policy would be used for different purposes. When focused on assessing the policy, the citizen may carefully consider the logic or cogency of the arguments as a means to form an attitude toward the policy. Conversely, during the lead-up to an election, the citizen may use their reactions to the arguments more as a way to infer traits that this politician possesses. Do these different processing foci hold different implications for persuasion by the message? If so, by what mechanism and under which circumstances do such effects emerge? The current research examined these possibilities in light of the burgeoning literature on the role of metacognition in persuasion. Self-Validation in PersuasionOver the past decade, a considerable amount of research on attitude change has focused on metacognition (i.e., thoughts about thoughts) or more specifically, the role of metacognitive XXX10.1177/0146167213499238Personality and Social Psychology BulletinClark et al. AbstractCharacteristics of persuasive message sources have been extensively studied. However, little attention has been paid to situations when people are motivated to form an evaluation of the communicator rather than the communicated issue. We postulated that these different foci can affect how a source validates message-related cognitions. Participants focused on the source (Studies 1 and 2) or the issue (Study 2) while reading weak or strong message arguments. Later, the communicator was described as...

"Strong" attitudes often have greater impact than "weak" attitudes. However, emerging research suggests that weak (uncertain) attitudes can substantially influence thinking or behavior. We propose metacognitive reflection as a moderator between traditional strength patterns and these emerging attitude bolstering patterns. Across six studies, research participants encountered a target person who agreed or disagreed with participants' attitudes. When focused on evaluating the target, attitudes predicted target evaluations better when the attitude was held with certainty (Study 1A), or after certainty had been primed (Studies 2A and 3; strength effects). However, when engaged in attitudinal social comparison (metacognitive reflection), attitudes better predicted target evaluation when the attitudes were held with doubt (Study 1B), or after doubt had been primed (Studies 2B and 3; bolstering effects). Expected change in certainty served as a mediator of attitude effects in metacognitive reflection but not target-focus conditions when doubt had been primed (Study 4).