Cognitive consistency and the formation of interpersonal attitudes: Cognitive balance affects the encoding of social information

• Published in: Journal of experimental social psychology Vol. 41; no. 6; pp. 618 - 626
• Main Authors: Gawronski, Bertram, Walther, Eva, Blank, Hartmut
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: San Diego, CA Elsevier Inc 01.11.2005; Elsevier; Academic Press
• Subjects: Attitude formation; Attitudes; Behavior. Attitude; Biological and medical sciences; Cognition & reasoning; Cognitive psychology; Empirical research; Fundamental and applied biological sciences. Psychology; Interpersonal perception; Interpersonal relations; Psychological tests; Psychology. Psychoanalysis. Psychiatry; Psychology. Psychophysiology; Regression analysis; Social attribution, perception and cognition; Social information; Social psychology; Human; Social attitude; Coding; Social interaction; Memory; Information processing; Social aspect; Interpersonal relation; Social cognition; Judgment
• ISSN: 0022-1031; 1096-0465
• DOI: 10.1016/j.jesp.2004.10.005

Three studies investigated the role of cognitive balance in the formation of interpersonal attitudes. Experiment 1 found evidence for balanced triads when participants first formed an attitude about one person, and then learned about this person’s sentiments about another individual. Interestingly, balanced triads were obtained for both explicitly and implicitly assessed attitudes. Experiment 2 indicated that the pattern of interpersonal relations does not result in balanced triads, when participants first learn about the relationship between two neutral individuals, and then receive evaluative information about one of the two individuals. In this case, observed sentiments and evaluative information affected attitudes in an additive rather than interactive manner. Experiment 3 replicated these findings by manipulating valence, observed sentiments, and order of information acquisition in a single study. Taken together, these results suggest that cognitive balance influences the encoding of social information, rather than the retroactive construal of evaluative judgments.