What is ambivalent attitude

Thus, having both positive and negative reactions does not necessarily result in feelings of conflict. Research has revealed a number of reasons for the weak correlation.

One reason is that feelings of conflict are not only the result of ambivalent positive and negative reactions. Specifically, people sometimes feel conflicted, even though they do not have ambivalent positive and negative reactions, because they hold attitudes that are at odds with those of people important to them. For instance, students who greatly oppose studying and are not in favor of it all may nonetheless feel conflicted if their parents like them to study.

Thus, ambivalence is not only an intrapersonal phenomenon i. There are also stable individual differences or personality characteristics that play a role in attitudinal ambivalence. In fact, a third reason for the low correlation between having ambivalent positive and negative reactions and experiencing conflict deals with the fact that some people have a weaker desire for consistency than others.

As it turns out, Megan Thompson and Mark Zanna have demonstrated that these people are not particularly bothered about feeling both good and bad about the same thing. Perhaps that explains why these individuals tend to be more likely to have ambivalent attitudes toward a variety of social issues, including state-funded abortion, euthanasia i.

In addition, people who enjoy thinking tend to have less-ambivalent attitudes, presumably because they manage to sift through and ultimately make sense of conflicting evidence for and against different positions on complex issues. Ambivalence has a variety of effects on how attitudes operate.

Attitudes are important to social psychology, in large part because they help predict behavior. If social psychologists know that someone has a negative attitude toward capital punishment, for instance, they can predict with some certainty that the person will vote to ban capital punishment if given the opportunity. Compared to other attitudes, however, ambivalent attitudes do not predict behavior very well.

In addition, ambivalent attitudes are less stable over time than other attitudes. Thus, if asked about their attitude toward capital punishment one month and again the next, people who are ambivalent toward capital punishment will be less likely than others to report the same attitude. For instance, Gregory Maio and colleagues found that when people are presented with a persuasive message dealing with issues that they are ambivalent about, they pay especially close attention to whether the message makes a compelling case or not.

Thus, they tend to be more persuaded by strong arguments than are people with nonambivalent attitudes but also less persuaded by weak arguments.

One explanation for this finding is that people with ambivalent attitudes scrutinize persuasive messages more carefully in hopes that the message will contain new information that will help them resolve their ambivalence.

The picture that has emerged is that when people feel ambivalent, they will do whatever it takes to make up their minds, whether that involves the hard work of paying close attention to persuasive messages or the easier work of looking to their peers for guidance. Contemporary work on attitudinal ambivalence has recently prompted research on emotional ambivalence. Most individuals at least occasionally experience such positive emotions as happiness, excitement, and relaxation and such negative emotions as sadness, anger, and fear, just to name a few.

Research on attitudinal ambivalence makes clears that sometimes people can feel both good and bad about the same object, but this does not mean that people can experience such seemingly opposite emotions as happiness and sadness at the same time. Indeed, one prominent model of emotion contends that happiness and sadness are mutually exclu-sive.

This disagreement represents the latest chapter in a long debate over the existence of mixed emotions. Socrates suggested that, for instance, tragic plays elicit mixed emotions by evoking pleasure in the midst of tears. The article concludes by presenting research questioning its functions as well as some applied work. Several literature reviews about attitudinal ambivalence are available, beginning with Jonas, et al.

Among these, many are important because they account for the lively discussions that have taken place in this field. Conner and Sparks examines the relationship between ambivalence and other features of attitude strength, while antecedents and consequences of attitudinal ambivalence are well reviewed in Conner and Armitage Ambivalence has been often linked to the activation of an aversive state, and conditions for such a state have also been discussed.

On this matter, the reader might consider van Harreveld, et al. Finally, Schneider and Schwarz may be helpful in order to better understand methodological aspects. Conner, M. Attitudinal ambivalence. In Attitudes and attitude change. Edited by W. Crano and R. Prislin, — New York: Psychology Press. This review starts with the claim that conceiving attitudes as univalent is an oversimplification, as it is very unlikely to endorse a totally positive or negative view of any object.

It therefore contradicts the idea of ambivalence as an exceptional state to overcome in some way. The authors provide an overview of conceptual and operational definitions, top-down and bottom-up antecedents, and consequences in terms of attitude stability, pliability, and attitude-behavior relationship.

Ambivalence and attitudes. European Review of Social Psychology — DOI: This chapter in the European Review of Social Psychology provides an overview of the general concept of ambivalence as a dimension of attitude strength. After comparing the various ways in which ambivalence has been defined, the authors review the evidence of its impact on information processing, intention, and behaviors; attitude temporal stability and pliability are also discussed. The classification and comparison among methods for measuring ambivalence is of particular importance.

Jonas, K. Broemer, and M. This is the first review of the scientific literature on ambivalence. The authors deal with the origin and the history of the concept and discuss the different operational approaches to measuring ambivalence. Rothman, N. Pratt, L. Rees, and T. Understanding the dual nature of ambivalence: Why and when ambivalence leads to good and bad outcomes. Clark, J. Attitudinal ambivalence and message-based persuasion: motivated processing of proattitudinal information and avoidance of counterattitudinal information.

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