National University of Singapore, Singapore.
George Mason University, USA.
Pers Soc Psychol Bull. 2023 Oct;49(10):1495-1510. doi: 10.1177/01461672221102015. Epub 2022 Jul 12.
Understanding when people are likely to feel ambivalent is important, as ambivalence is associated with key attitude outcomes, such as attitude-behavior consistency. Interestingly, the presence of conflicting positive and negative reactions (objective ambivalence) is weakly related to feeling conflicted (subjective ambivalence). We tested a novel situation that can influence the correspondence between objective and subjective ambivalence: whether a message and a recipient's topic match in affective versus cognitive orientation. When a person encounters a message with an affective or cognitive match to the topic, conflicting reactions may be more accessible, increasing feelings of ambivalence. Across five studies, greater objective-subjective ambivalence correspondence occurred with an affective-cognitive match between message and topic orientation. Studies 4 and 5 also demonstrated that this primarily occurred when the message was counterattitudinal. This work contributes to the literature explaining the gap between measures of objective and subjective ambivalence as well as how messages can influence attitude strength properties.
理解人们何时可能感到矛盾心理很重要，因为矛盾心理与关键的态度结果有关，例如态度-行为一致性。有趣的是，存在相互冲突的积极和消极反应（客观矛盾心理）与感到矛盾（主观矛盾心理）的关系较弱。我们测试了一种新的情况，这种情况会影响客观矛盾心理和主观矛盾心理之间的一致性：信息与接收者的主题在情感还是认知方面是否匹配。当一个人遇到与主题在情感或认知上匹配的信息时，相互冲突的反应可能更容易出现，从而增加矛盾心理的感觉。在五项研究中，当信息与主题方向在情感-认知方面相匹配时，客观-主观矛盾心理的一致性更大。研究 4 和 5 还表明，这种情况主要发生在信息与态度相反时。这项工作有助于解释客观矛盾心理和主观矛盾心理之间的差距的文献，以及信息如何影响态度强度属性。
