Attitudes toward hiring people with disabilities: A meta‐cognitive approach to persuasion

Abstract

Attitudes toward hiring people with disabilities are becoming critical for promoting diversity and egalitarianism within organizations. The few interventions designed to promote positive attitudes toward people with disabilities have relied on changing either the direction and/or the amount of thoughts people generate with regard to this discriminated, understudied group. In the present research, we examine the impact of a different psychological process of attitude change based on meta‐cognition, or thinking about thinking. We used a meta‐cognitive approach to changing prejudiced attitudes because thoughtful processes are often overlooked or denied with regard to this particular group. Specifically, we explored the impact of thought confidence on attitude change across two studies designed to change attitudes toward the incorporation of people with disabilities in companies. In each study, participants first generated either positive or negative thoughts about the proposal (thought valence manipulation). Then, the confidence in those thoughts was measured (Study 1) or manipulated (Study 2). In concert with the self‐validation hypothesis, results showed that when thought confidence was relatively high (vs. low), thought valence had a greater impact on attitudes. Thus, thought valence was more predictive of attitudes when participants were confident in their thoughts. Specifically, confidence in thoughts enhanced persuasion for positive thoughts but reduced persuasion for negative thoughts. These findings provide insights into assessing effects of interventions aiming at improving attitudes toward the inclusion of minority groups in organizations.

The impact of hope and hopelessness on evaluation: A meta‐cognitive approach

“…Based on the coding assigned by the independent raters, an index of the valence of thoughts was created for each participant. This measure served as a Thought Valence manipulation check (see also, Briñol et al., 2018; Gandarillas et al., 2018; Requero et al., 2020).…”

Self-validation theory: An integrative framework for understanding when thoughts become consequential.

“…In addition to potentially accounting for various self-help inductions, thought validation processes have also proven relevant for producing consequential changes in prejudiced attitudes, and for promoting egalitarianism and enhancing diversity (Briñol & Petty, 2020). For instance, using SVT in the domain of stigmatized groups has proven to be a useful technique for reducing objectification (e.g., Briñol, Petty, & Belding, 2017), and for encouraging people to trust in their thoughts about hiring people from underrepresented groups such as those with mental challenges and physical disabilities (Requero et al, 2020). Furthermore, SVT studies have shown that the perceived validity of prejudice-relevant thoughts can be manipulated by providing participants with convergent (vs. divergent) evidence matching their thoughts (Clark et al, 2009, 2013), by highlighting the entitative nature of their groups (Clark & Thiem, 2015), and merely by priming the concept of justice (Santos & Rivera, 2015).…”

Metacognitive Confidence Can Increase but Also Decrease Performance in Academic Settings

“…The two measures were significantly correlated (r = .68, p < 0.001) and were thus averaged to form one single measure of perceived validity. Similar items have been used to measure thought confidence in other self-validation studies revealing that perceived thought validity can be measured by merely asking participants to rate their thought confidence (e.g., Petty et al, 2002;Horcajo et al, 2020;Requero et al, 2020; see also Graft et al, 2017). Responses to this composite index were scored so that higher values represented the perception of more validity of thoughts.…”

“…After this thought valence induction, the perceived validity of the primary cognitions listed (metacognitive confidence) was manipulated to be relatively high or low. Specifically, participants were randomly assigned to either recall past episodes of confidence or past episodes of doubt (Petty et al, 2002;Requero et al, 2020). As a dependent measure, participants in this experiment were asked to solve a test consisting of 30 multiple-choice questions from the Graduate Record Examination (Jamieson et al, 2010).…”

“…In the invalidation condition, participants were asked to describe a past personal episode in which they felt doubt. Prior research has shown that this manipulation following a thought listing can lead people to misattribute the high or low confidence induced by the writing task to the thoughts listed previously (metacognitive confidence), even though these thoughts are unrelated to the episodes described (Petty et al, 2002;Requero et al, 2020).…”