Wilson, Lindey and Schooler’s article ‘a model of dual attitudes‘ (2000) concerns how a new attitude can arise, while the old attitude is not replaced, remaining in memory.
They complete a line of attitude-research:
- Stability and Automaticity: attitudes as strored evaluations (rigid, resistant attitudes and a low thresshold for ‘popping up’)
- The liability of Evaluation: Attitudes as context-sensitive constructions (attitudes constructed through real time experiences)
- The anchoring and adjustment model of attidude change (reconciling (1) and (2))
- Dual attitude model (like 3, including the notion that and ‘old’ attitude is suppressed and not overwritten)
… when an initial attidue is strong, it biases the processing of new information in an attitude-congruent direction
They split impicit and explicit attitudes, where implicite attitudes are described as unknown origin, activated automatically and influence uncontrollable responses. It seems people are unaware of the origin of these attitudes (thus their evaluation), but not of the attitudes itselves.
Wilson et al. describe 4 types of dual attitudes:
- Repression (anxiety-provoking attitude is kept out of awareness)
- Independent systems / independence (two evaluations -implicit nonconsious and explicit conscious- of attitudes exist independently, where the implicit is unaware and does not have to be overriden)
- Motivated overriding (people suppress a consious attitude with another created or retrieved attitude)
- Automatic overriding (automatic suppression)
Other dimensions of attitudes, besides dual attitudes are:
- Different categorizations of the attitude object (i.e. different attitudes of a politician when using category ‘debating skills’ or ‘political view’)
- Ambivalence (both positive and negative feelings toward a stimulus, i.e. ‘callories’ and ‘taste’ of a cheese cake)
The writers also label their 4 types to different literatures relevant to their model: human motivation, attachment, dependency needs, attribution style, prejudice and stereotyping, affective perseverance, attitudes towards relationships, dissonance.
They also suggest that people can have more than two attitudes, a multiple attitude system. Extrapolating from a personal perspective: Regarding to group behavior, within a group their is also a multiple attitude system, where between explicit and implicit attitudes, also a more or less shared attitude duality arises: a multiple attitude system within and between groups.
