Cognitive consistency and the formation of interpersonal attitudes: Cognitive balance affects the encoding of social information

Gawronski, Bertram; Walther, Eva; Blank, Hartmut

doi:10.1016/j.jesp.2004.10.005

Cited by 118 publications

(109 citation statements)

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“…Moreover, balance-related inferences should leave associative evaluations unaffected if the temporal order of information acquisition would require a retroactive qualification of previously observed sentiment relations (e.g., when participants first learn about the attitude of a neutral source individual toward a neutral target individual and then receive evaluative information about the source). This assumption was confirmed by Gawronski, Walther, and Blank (2005) in a series of three experiments.Another example for the present case is a recent study by Petty et al (2006). These researchers first induced a positive or negative …”

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confidence: 57%

Associative and propositional processes in evaluation: An integrative review of implicit and explicit attitude change.

Gawronski

Bodenhausen²

2006

Psychological Bulletin

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A central theme in recent research on attitudes is the distinction between deliberate, "explicit" attitudes and automatic, "implicit" attitudes. The present article provides an integrative review of the available evidence on implicit and explicit attitude change that is guided by a distinction between associative and propositional processes. Whereas associative processes are characterized by mere activation independent of subjective truth or falsity, propositional reasoning is concerned with the validation of evaluations and beliefs. The proposed associative-propositional evaluation (APE) model makes specific assumptions about the mutual interplay of the 2 processes, implying several mechanisms that lead to symmetric or asymmetric changes in implicit and explicit attitudes. The model integrates a broad range of empirical evidence and implies several new predictions for implicit and explicit attitude change.Keywords: attitude change, cognitive consistency, dual-process models, evaluative conditioning, implicit measures If eras of psychological research can be characterized in terms of general ideas, a major theme of the current era is probably the notion of automaticity. Many aspects of human behavior that have previously been assumed to have their roots in higher order processes of deliberate reasoning are now viewed as resulting from automatic processes that may occur spontaneously and outside of people's awareness or control (Bargh, 1997;Moors & De Houwer, 2006). This perspective is also dominant in contemporary research on attitudes, in which deliberate, "explicit" attitudes are often contrasted with automatic, "implicit" attitudes (Greenwald & Banaji, 1995; Petty, Fazio, & Briñol, in press;Wilson, Lindsey, & Schooler, 2000; Wittenbrink & Schwarz, in press). Whereas the former are usually equated with deliberative, self-reported evaluations, the latter are typically inferred from people's performance on response latency measures, such as the Implicit Association Test (IAT; Greenwald, McGhee, & Schwartz, 1998) or sequential priming tasks (Fazio, Jackson, Dunton, & Williams, 1995;Wittenbrink, Judd, & Park, 1997).Even though previous models effectively account for the differential impact of implicit and explicit attitudes on spontaneous and deliberate behavior (e.g., Strack & Deutsch, 2004;Wilson et al., 2000), theories of attitude change still face a considerable asymmetry in integrating the available evidence. Contemporary models of persuasion have been very successful in explaining the influence of different kinds of message cues on self-reported explicit evaluations (Chen & Chaiken, 1999;Kruglanski & Thompson, 1999;Petty & Wegener, 1999; for a review, see Visser & Cooper, 2003). However, changes in implicit attitudes are still largely unexplained. This shortfall has its roots in at least two conceptual issues. First, several models of attitude change do not distinguish between implicit and explicit attitudes in the first place but treat attitudes as a unitary construct (e.g., Chaiken, Liberman, & Eagly, 1989...

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confidence: 57%

Associative and propositional processes in evaluation: An integrative review of implicit and explicit attitude change.

Gawronski

Bodenhausen²

2006

Psychological Bulletin

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2,089

165

2,421

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“…The present research has several advances over previous work on implicit balance. The most important of these extensions has to do with moving from static to more dynamic views of implicit balance in consumer persuasion (Gawronski, Walther, & Blank, 2005;Langer et al, 2009;Walther, 2002). That is, whereas most previous research has focused on the examination of implicitly measured constructs (e.g., the self, an object or a group, and valence), the present research took a more experimental approach to examine implicit balance.…”

Section: Implications For Implicit Balancementioning

confidence: 99%

Consumer persuasion: Indirect change and implicit balance

Horcajo

Briñol

Petty

2010

Psychology and Marketing

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The present research examines two main issues relevant to consumer persuasion: (1) whether automatic evaluations can change (both directly and indirectly) in response to verbal ads that engage deliberative information processing activity, and (2) whether such messages can result in spreading activation of implicit change that is consistent with balance principles. The first study showed that automatic evaluations of vegetables were more favorable after people read a health ad than a control message. The results of Study 2 showed that automatic associations toward Heineken (a brand associated with the color green) were also more favorable as a result of processing a message advocating the color green than a neutral control message. Consistent with the idea that automatic changes can be consequential not only for brands but also for consumer identity, participants of Study 3 showed more automatic self-vegetable associations after thinking about the benefits (rather than the negative consequences) of consuming vegetables. A final study revealed that false feedback increasing (vs. decreasing) self-product identity led to more favorable automatic attitudes toward the product, but only for those with relatively high scores on the implicit measure of selfesteem. Taken together, this series of studies suggests that automatic changes that result from consumer persuasion are consequential in terms of spreading activation and that they seem to respond to balance principles.

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“…More precisely, such "implicit" measures allow one to infer evaluations from response latencies or error rates, typically in speeded categorization Based on evidence that automatic evaluations assessed by these measures reliably predict judgments and behavior (for a review, see , researchers became increasingly interested in questions pertaining to their origin and change (Gawronski & Bodenhausen, 2006;Petty, Briñol, & DeMarree, 2007;Rudman, 2004;Wilson, Lindsey, & Schooler, 2000). For instance, with regard to their origin, researchers have explored the roles of evaluative conditioning (e.g., Olson, & Fazio, 2001), cognitive balance (e.g., Gawronski, Walther & Blank, 2005a), and ingroup favoritism (e.g., Otten & Wentura, 1999). Moreover, research addressing change in automatic evaluations has investigated various mechanisms, including cognitive dissonance (e.g., Gawronski & Strack, 2004), attitude-related education programs (e.g., Rudman, Ashmore, & Gary, 2001), and extended training in negating evaluative responses (e.g., Gawronski, Deutsch, Mbirkou, Seibt, & Strack, 2008a;Kawakami, Dovidio, Moll, & Hermsen, 2000).…”

Section: Function Of Task Characteristics Of the Measurementioning

confidence: 99%

When the method makes a difference: Antagonistic effects on “automatic evaluations” as a function of task characteristics of the measure

Deutsch

Gawronski

2009

Journal of Experimental Social Psychology

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Cognitive consistency and the formation of interpersonal attitudes: Cognitive balance affects the encoding of social information

Cited by 118 publications

References 20 publications

Associative and propositional processes in evaluation: An integrative review of implicit and explicit attitude change.

Associative and propositional processes in evaluation: An integrative review of implicit and explicit attitude change.

Consumer persuasion: Indirect change and implicit balance

When the method makes a difference: Antagonistic effects on “automatic evaluations” as a function of task characteristics of the measure

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