View article

Judgment certainty has been an enduring and influential construct in many areas of psychology, including judgment, decision-making, memory, and the self. Perhaps the most developed literature on certainty, however, is in the domain of people’s attitudes. Attitude certainty is an important determinant of the strength of an attitude, but no prior research has examined whether the basis of that certainty matters. The present research considers whether the reasons that people think underlie their certainty affect the process through which they resist persuasion. Previous research showed that attitudes held with relative certainty change less in response to counterattitudinal persuasive communication, but this research goes a step further, proposing that perceived bases for certainty are impactful for the process through which people achieve resistance. The present studies hypothesized that perceiving oneself to have relatively strong vs. weak reasons for certainty would be associated with thoughtful ways of resisting persuasion. This research found that people with relatively strong reasons for being sure of an attitude showed greater thought in responding to persuasive communication, expending greater effort in processing the message and generating more thoughtful anti-message responses. These questions were examined in eleven studies. Studies 1–3 explore people’s perceived reasons for certainty, showing that people endorse a variety of reasons for being sure of an attitude and that these reasons vary in their perceived strength. Studies 4–7 consider the effects of specific reasons for certainty, which were shown to reflect relatively strong and …