Authors
Kenneth G DeMarree, Richard E Petty, Pablo Briñol, Ji Xia
Publication date
2020/12
Journal
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
Volume
119
Issue
6
Pages
1239
Publisher
American Psychological Association
Description
The certainty with which people hold their attitudes is an important consideration because attitudes held with certainty better predict judgment and behavior than attitudes held with doubt. However, little is known about whether people’s assessments of their certainty reflect a disposition to hold attitudes with confidence. Adapting methods used to document individual differences in people’s attitudes, the present research demonstrates that the certainty with which people hold any given attitude is in part a reflection of a relatively stable disposition. Across 5 studies and 6 samples (total N= 106,050), we demonstrate dispositional variability in attitude certainty and show that it is related to but distinct from confidence in other judgmental domains. We also demonstrate that dispositional attitude certainty may be useful in predicting certainty in newly formed evaluations (Study 3) and an important consequence of certainty …
Total citations
2020202120222023202416864
Scholar articles
KG DeMarree, RE Petty, P Briñol, J Xia - Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2020