|
|
|
|
Alice Eagly Northwestern University An Affair to Remember
Many theories of the effects of attitudes on memory for attitude-relevant
information would predict that attitudinally congenial information should be more
memorable than uncongenial information. Yet, a meta-analysis showed that this congeniality
effect is very inconsistent across the experiments in this research literature and small
when these effects are aggregated. The tendency of the congeniality effect to decrease
over the years spanned by this literature appeared to reflect the weaker methods used in
the earlier studies. Nonetheless, subsequent primary research as well as additional
meta-analytic findings suggest that both attitude structure and motivation to process
attitude-relevant information are relevant to understanding the conditions under which
people have superior memory for attitudinally congenial or uncongenial information.
Alice Eagly
|