Wanting other attitudes: Actual–desired attitude discrepancies predict feelings of ambivalence and ambivalence consequences

• People can desire attitudes that differ in valence from their current attitude. • Actual–desired discrepancies lead people to feel ambivalent. • Discrepancies also reduce prediction of behavior and increase information interest. a b s t r a c t a r t i c l e i n f o The experience of attitudinal ambivalence (subjective ambivalence) is important because it predicts key consequences of attitudes (e.g., attitude–behavior correspondence, attitude stability). However, the field's understanding of the antecedents of subjective ambivalence is still developing. We explore an unexamined antecedent of subjective ambivalence. Specifically, we examined discrepancies between participants' actual attitudes and their desired attitudes as antecedents of subjective ambivalence and ambivalence consequences. Six studies using a variety of attitude objects were conducted to test these ideas. The first four studies demonstrated that actual–desired attitude discrepancies predicted subjective ambivalence over its previously documented antecedents. Critically, two additional studies showed that actual–desired attitude discrepancies predicted important consequences of ambivalence. As actual–desired attitude discrepancies increased, participants' attitude–behavior correspondence decreased (Study 5), and desire to reduce attitudinal conflict increased (Study 6). Process data in these latter studies revealed indirect effects through subjective ambivalence that held after controlling for the objective presence of evaluative conflict. Introduction Everyone has experienced evaluative conflict, or the simultaneous presence of positive and negative reactions towards the same object One can love the taste of chocolate cake, but hate the calories; approve of a political candidate's foreign policy stances, but disapprove of his or her environmental policies; or have conflicting feelings (e.g., joy and anxiety) about a new romance. The term ambivalence broadly refers to these mixed evaluative reactions whether they stem from explicit or implicit discrepancies (Petty & Briñol, 2009). People can be ambivalent about a wide variety of topics (e.g., abortion, career choices) and domains (e.g., health, race, self), and the study of ambivalence has therefore inter-ambivalence is critically important for understanding attitudes. For example , the more ambivalence one experiences regarding an object, the less functional one's attitude becomes in orienting one's behaviortent with this idea, people with ambivalent (versus univalent) attitudes tend to be slower to report their attitudes (Bargh, Chaiken, Govender, & Pratto, 1992), are more sensitive to context effects in attitude expression ☆ We thank Myiah Hutchens for her assistance with the statistical analyses employed in Study 5.