TY - JOUR
T1 - Do attitudes affect memory? Tests of the congeniality hypothesis
AU - Eagly, Alice H.
AU - Kulesa, Patrick
AU - Chen, Serena
AU - Chaiken, Shelly
PY - 2001/2
Y1 - 2001/2
N2 - Social psychologists have usually hypothesized that attitudinal selectivity biases people's memory in favor of information that is congenial to their attitudes, because they are motivated to defend their attitudes against uncongenial information. However, our meta-analysis found that such effects have been only inconsistently obtained. One reason for these inconsistencies is that the defense of attitudes against attacks does not necessarily entail avoiding the uncongenial information. As shown by our experiments, people often expose themselves of attitudinally uncongenial information, attend to it, scrutinize it carefully, encode it accurately, and remember it fairly well, even though they dislike the information and are not persuaded by it. Given sufficient motivation and capacity, people mount an active defense that enhances memory for the information.
AB - Social psychologists have usually hypothesized that attitudinal selectivity biases people's memory in favor of information that is congenial to their attitudes, because they are motivated to defend their attitudes against uncongenial information. However, our meta-analysis found that such effects have been only inconsistently obtained. One reason for these inconsistencies is that the defense of attitudes against attacks does not necessarily entail avoiding the uncongenial information. As shown by our experiments, people often expose themselves of attitudinally uncongenial information, attend to it, scrutinize it carefully, encode it accurately, and remember it fairly well, even though they dislike the information and are not persuaded by it. Given sufficient motivation and capacity, people mount an active defense that enhances memory for the information.
KW - Attitudes
KW - Congeniality effect
KW - Memory
KW - Memory for attitude-relevant information
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=0035606904&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=0035606904&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1111/1467-8721.00102
DO - 10.1111/1467-8721.00102
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:0035606904
VL - 10
SP - 5
EP - 9
JO - Current Directions in Psychological Science
JF - Current Directions in Psychological Science
SN - 0963-7214
IS - 1
ER -