Attitude Certainty and Conflict Style: Divergent Effects of Correctness and Clarity

Listening and attitude change

We review research on the role of high-quality listening behavior in attitude change. We examine how listening behaviors can impact attitudes and the mechanisms underlying these effects. The article discusses research that explicitly examines high-quality listening, as well as research that examines behaviors that may indicate high-quality listening or that incorporates high-quality listening into larger interventions. The reviewed research suggests that receiving high-quality listening increases psychological safety and open-minded self-reflection, leading people to consider perspectives they otherwise would not. This in turn leads to less extreme, clearer, and more nuanced views on the topic of conversation. Finally, we highlight the need for further research to better understand the role of listening in attitude change, particularly in non-western cultures.

Attitudes in an interpersonal context: Psychological safety as a route to attitude change

Interpersonal contexts can be complex because they can involve two or more people who are interdependent, each of whom is pursuing both individual and shared goals. Interactions consist of individual and joint behaviors that evolve dynamically over time. Interactions are likely to affect people’s attitudes because the interpersonal context gives conversation partners a great deal of opportunity to intentionally or unintentionally influence each other. However, despite the importance of attitudes and attitude change in interpersonal interactions, this topic remains understudied. To shed light on the importance of this topic. We briefly review the features of interpersonal contexts and build a case that understanding people’s sense of psychological safety is key to understanding interpersonal influences on people’s attitudes. Specifically, feeling psychologically safe can make individuals more open-minded, increase reflective introspection, and decrease defensive processing. Psychological safety impacts how individuals think, make sense of their social world, and process attitude-relevant information. These processes can result in attitude change, even without any attempt at persuasion. We review the literature on interpersonal threats, receiving psychological safety, providing psychological safety, and interpersonal dynamics. We then detail the shortcomings of current approaches, highlight unanswered questions, and suggest avenues for future research that can contribute in developing this field.

Feeling correct is feeling prejudiced: The differential effects of attitude correctness and attitude clarity on evaluations of outgroups

Global attitude certainty consists of two subconstructs: attitude clarity—certainty that one is aware of one’s true attitudes—and attitude correctness, certainty that one’s attitudes are morally correct and valid. Attitude correctness is more often associated with group-related psychological and behavioral outcomes than attitude clarity. As such, we expected that attitude correctness, but not attitude clarity, would be associated with more negative attitudes toward outgroups when group boundaries are defined by attitudes. Across four studies, greater attitude correctness related to more negative attitudes toward attitudinal outgroups regardless of context (e.g., political, religious); attitude clarity’s relationship to prejudice was inconsistent (Studies 1a and 2: positive or no relationship; Study 3: negative; Studies 1b and 4: no relationship). In Studies 2 and 3, mediational analyses showed that greater attitude correctness was associated with stronger beliefs that group boundaries are sharp and distinct (i.e., discreteness beliefs), which in turn was associated with greater prejudice. Finally, Study 4 demonstrated that the attitude correctness–prejudice link was associated with greater intention to engage in competitive behaviors in a conflict resolution scenario with an outgroup member.

Examining Christians' Reactions to Reminders of Religion-Science Conflict: Stereotype Threat versus Disengagement

Stereotypes of religion (particularly Christianity) as incompatible with science are widespread, and prior findings show that Christians perform worse than non-Christians on scientific reasoning tasks following reminders of such stereotypes. The present studies (N = 1,456) examine whether these reminders elicit stereotype threat (i.e., fear of confirming negative societal stereotypes about one's group), disengagement (i.e., distancing oneself from a domain perceived as incongruent with the values of one's group), or both. In Studies 1 and 2, Christians demonstrated lower task performance and greater subjective feelings of stereotype threat (but did not spend less time on the task) relative to non-Christians when beliefs about Christianity-science incompatibility were chronic or made salient. Furthermore, the effects of incompatibility stereotypes on performance were most pronounced among Christians who identified strongly with science and hence worried most about confirming negative stereotypes (Studies 3-4). Implications for Christians' responses to religion-science conflict narratives and participation in science are discussed.

Research on the Influence Mechanism of Rational Consumers' Food Safety Supervision Satisfaction

As emerging food safety incidents have gained widespread concerns, research on consumers’ attitudes towards this issue is crucial to create effective solutions. To this end, in accordance with relevant data of consumers in 13 cities with subordinate districts, Jiangsu province, this paper divided different consumer groups by their experience so as to study their degree of satisfaction towards food safety and corresponding influencing factors. According to the descriptive statistics and the building of the cumulative logistic regression model, the results therefrom showed that consumers with direct or indirect experience have separate attitudes towards food safety which cannot be changed by changing consumers’ personal characteristics. Moreover, the two groups are divided in their demands in food production and consumption along with exceptions on policy implementation, etc. Finally, suggestions to improve consumers’ satisfaction are given in at the end of the paper.

The Listener Sets the Tone: High-Quality Listening Increases Attitude Clarity and Behavior-Intention Consequences

We examined how merely sharing attitudes with a good listener shapes speakers' attitudes. We predicted that high-quality (i.e., empathic, attentive, and nonjudgmental) listening reduces speakers' social anxiety and leads them to delve deeper into their attitude-relevant knowledge (greater self-awareness). This, subsequently, differentially affects two components of speaker's attitude certainty by increasing attitude clarity, but not attitude correctness. In addition, we predicted that this increased clarity is followed by increased attitude- expression intentions, but not attitude- persuasion intentions. We obtained consistent support for our hypotheses across five experiments (including one preregistered study), manipulating listening behavior in a variety of ways. This is the first evidence that an interpersonal variable, unrelated to the attitude itself, can affect attitude clarity and its consequences.

The Curvilinear Relationship Between Attitude Certainty and Attitudinal Advocacy

Do people advocate more on behalf of their own attitudes and opinions when they feel certain or uncertain? Although considerable past research suggests that people are more likely to advocate when they feel highly certain, there also is evidence for the opposite effect-that people sometimes advocate more when they experience a loss of certainty. The current research seeks to merge these insights. Specifically, we explore the possibility that the relationship between attitude certainty and attitudinal advocacy is curvilinear. Consistent with this hypothesis, we find evidence for a J-shaped curve: Advocacy intentions (and behavior) peak under high certainty, bottom out under moderate certainty, and show an uptick under low (relative to moderate) certainty. We document this relationship and investigate its potential mechanisms in three studies by examining advocacy intentions and the actual advocacy messages participants write when they feel high, moderate, or low certainty.

Female Dominance in Human Groups

Compared to men, women less often attain high-level positions and generally have lower status in society. In smaller groups, the relative influence of men and women depends on gender composition, but research is inconclusive regarding the relation between gender composition and female influence. Studies of nonhuman primates show that when females are in the minority they become more dominant over males, but only when conflict levels are high, because under these conditions men fight among each other. Similarly, here we show, in two studies with mixed gender groups ( N = 90 and N = 56), that women were more dominant in groups with a high percentage of men and high levels of conflict. This depends on gender differences in aggressive behavior, inducing more aggressive behavior in women eliminated this increase in female dominance. Our work reveals that status relations between the genders among nonhuman primates can generalize to humans.

Attitude Certainty and Attitudinal Advocacy

When and why do people advocate on behalf of their attitudes? Past research suggests that attitude certainty is one important determinant. The current research seeks to provide more nuanced insight into this relationship by (a) exploring the unique roles of attitude clarity and attitude correctness, and (b) mapping clarity and correctness onto different forms of advocacy (sharing intentions and persuasion intentions). Across four studies, we find that correctness but not clarity plays an important role in promoting persuasion intentions, whereas both correctness and clarity help shape sharing intentions. Thus, this research unpacks the certainty–advocacy relation and helps identify experimental manipulations that uniquely drive persuasion and sharing intentions.

Feeling High but Playing Low

Past research has demonstrated a causal relationship between power and dominant behavior, motivated in part by the desire to maintain the social distinctiveness created by one’s position of power. In this article, we test the novel idea that some individuals respond to high-power roles by displaying not dominance but instead submissiveness. We theorize that high-power individuals who are also high in the need to belong experience the social distinctiveness associated with power as threatening, rather than as an arrangement to protect and maintain. We predict that such individuals will counter their feelings of threat with submissive behaviors to downplay their power and thereby reduce their distinctiveness. We found support for this hypothesis across three studies using different operationalizations of power, need to belong, and submissiveness. Furthermore, Study 3 illustrated the mediating role of fear of (positive) attention in the relationship between power, need to belong, and submissive behavior.