Attitude change and source monitoring errors following imagined scenarios of attitude-relevant interactions

Abstract

Two studies tested competing hypotheses explaining an attitude change phenomenon. Previous studies have shown a relationship between memory errors and attitudes, where attitude change has been found to follow source monitoring errors of imagined events. It is believed that writing hypothetical scenarios of detailed, first person accounts of interactions with a target group member, causes source monitoring errors to occur where the imagined events become confused with actual events in memory. People often look to their memories for information when reporting their current attitudes, and errors in attitude-relevant memories are suspected to lead to altered attitude reports. A competing hypothesis may be that attitudes change online while imagining interactions with a target group member and that the observed memory errors are a byproduct of changed attitudes. Study 1 showed that attitudes did not significantly change immediately after writing hypothetical scenarios of imagined interactions, but did change three weeks following the manipulation when memory errors were found to have occurred. Study 2 showed that memory errors were not found following a different attitude change manipulation that resulted in a similar magnitude of change. Here, again, attitude change did follow source monitoring errors resulting from writing hypothetical accounts of imagined attitude-relevant actions. Together, these studies suggest that the memory error account is more accurate than a memory bias account in explaining the attitude change that follows imagining attitude-relevant actions