New York University, USA
Research suggests both that attitudes can be remarkably stable across situations, and that they often fluctuate depending on the immediate social context. The present perspective seeks to integrate these findings by using construal level and shared reality theories to inform our understanding of attitudes as functional summaries of socially-shared information. We reasoned that low-level construals of an attitude object should elicit local evaluative summaries, tuned to a particular, shared social context, whereas high-level construals should elicit global summaries, abstracted across multiple contexts. Attitude alignment (at least in temporary social relationships) should therefore occur primarily when the attitude object is construed at a low level. In Study 1, temporal distance was used to manipulate construal. Participants expected to interact with a partner who was favorable or unfavorable toward deporting illegal immigrants, and reported voting preferences for a deportation policy that would be implemented next week or next year. Whereas participants’ attitudes were significantly influenced by partner attitudes for the near-future policy, there was no alignment effect in the distant-future condition. Study 2 zeroed in on our hypothesized process by manipulating construal level directly. Results revealed that participants in a low-level mindset condition aligned their attitudes toward euthanasia with their partner’s attitudes, whereas those in a high-level mindset condition did not. Implications are discussed for the impact of construal-relevant variables (e.g., social distance, linguistic abstraction) on attitude alignment, and a broader theoretical perspective is proposed, in which attitudes are viewed as evaluative summaries that can draw from temporary or ongoing shared realities.
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