On the Functional Value of Attitudes: The Influence of Accessible Attitudes on the Ease and Quality of Decision Making

Abstract

A series of experiments relevant to the functional value of accessible attitudes is reported. Experiment 1 established that diastolic blood pressure was sensitive to the task demands involved in subjects' expression of a preference between pairs of abstract paintings. In Experiments 2 and 3, subjects who had developed and rehearsed attitudes toward the individual paintings displayed a smaller elevation in diastolic blood pressure while performing this pairwise preference task than control subjects, suggesting that attitudes can ease decision making. Experiment 4 provided converging evidence for this hypothesis in that faster decision latencies were observed during the pairwise preference task when subjects had previously developed accessible attitudes toward the individual paintings. Evidence was also obtained suggesting that accessible attitudes enhanced the quality of the decisions made during the pairwise preference task.