Attitudes Formation by Small but Meaningful Personal Information

Abstract

Objective People often evaluate others using fragmentary but meaningful personal information in recent days through social media. It is not clear that whether this process is implicit or explicit and what kind of information is more important in such process. We examined the effects of several meaningful fragmentary information onattitude. Methods Thirty three KAIST students were provided four fragmentary information about four virtual people that are meaningful in evaluating people and frequently seen in real life situations, and were asked to imagine that person during four follow-up sessions. Explicit and Implicit attitudes were measured using Likert scale and Implicit Association Test respectively. Also, eye tracking was done to find out the most important information. Results Strong explicit attitudes, were formed toward both men and women, and weak but significant implicit attitudes, were generated toward men only. Eyetracking results showed that people spent more time reading morality information. Conclusion Our results indicate that explicit attitudes are made by propositional learning, which is the main component for evaluating others with several meaningful fragmentary information, and implicit attitudes are formed by top down process. And as well as those of previous studies, morality information was suggested as the most important factor in developing attitudes.