Attitudes Based on Feelings: Fixed or Fleeting?

Area of Science:

• Psychology
• Consumer Behavior
• Social Science

Background:

• Understanding attitude stability is crucial for researchers and practitioners.
• Existing research highlights various factors influencing attitude persistence.
• The specific role of emotionality in attitude stability requires further investigation.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate the relationship between emotionality and attitude stability.
• To determine if emotional attitudes are more resistant to change over time.
• To explore the implications of emotionality for persuasive communication and consumer behavior.

Main Methods:

• Conducted seven longitudinal studies with over 20,000 participants evaluating brands and gifts.
• Performed a linguistic analysis of 75,000 online consumer reviews.
• Examined the impact of emotion-evoking persuasive messages on attitude decay.

Main Results:

• Attitudes with higher emotional content demonstrated significantly greater stability over time.
• Positive emotional opinions were particularly resistant to change.
• Emotionality in initial reviews predicted attitude persistence in subsequent reviews, even years later.
• Emotion-evoking messages led to attitudes that decayed less over time.
• These effects were independent of other known attitude-strength attributes.

Conclusions:

• Emotionality is a key determinant of attitude stability.
• Individuals tend to underestimate the persistence of emotional attitudes.
• Findings have implications for marketing, communication strategies, and understanding public opinion formation.