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The Impact of Balanced Risk–Benefit Information and Initial Attitudes on Post‐Information Attitudes 1
Author(s) -
VAN DIJK HELEEN,
FISCHER ARNOUT R. H.,
DE JONGE JANNEKE,
ROWE GENE,
FREWER LYNN J.
Publication year - 2012
Publication title -
journal of applied social psychology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.822
H-Index - 111
eISSN - 1559-1816
pISSN - 0021-9029
DOI - 10.1111/j.1559-1816.2012.00926.x
Subject(s) - negativity effect , psychology , negative information , social psychology , context (archaeology) , attitude change , negativity bias , biology , paleontology
In a realistic social context, people are confronted with both positive and negative information, yet research on this topic is relatively scarce. We present 2 studies examining the role of initial attitudes on the impact of one‐sided vs. balanced positive and negative information on attitudes toward food production methods. The first experiment demonstrated that one‐sided information influenced post‐information attitudes congruent to the direction of the message content. The second experiment showed that the effect of balanced information on post‐information attitudes may depend on initial attitudes. These results demonstrate that negativity effects are dominant for people with initial positive attitudes, but change into positivity effects for people with initial negative attitudes. Implications for communicating both positive and negative information are discussed.