Strong Attitudes Without Elaboration: The Threshold Difference Effect

Dweck, Chiu, and Hong (1995) identify two distinct implicit self-theories—entity vs. incremental theory. People who endorse entity theory (entity theorists) believe that their personal traits (i.e., personality and intelligence) are fixed, while people who endorse incremental theory (incremental theorists) view their personal traits as malleable. This line of research has found that individuals can extend their implicit self-theories to other people and even to brands/products (e.g. Yorkstone, Nunes, and Matta 2010; Park and John 2010). Recently, Kwon and Nayakankuppam (working paper) find that individuals’ implicit self-theory orientation affects their attitude formation processes towards products/brands. Specifically, they find that entity theorists form attitudes with lower level of elaboration, but the strengths associated with the attitudes are greater, than incremental theorists. These findings are noteworthy because they suggest that the link between elaboration and attitude strength could be more complicated than the consistent finding in the attitude literature: strong attitudes are products of effortful cognitive elaboration (Petty and Cacioppo 1984; Petty and Wegener 1999). In this paper, we examine the underlying mechanism of this strong attitude formation without high level of elaboration. We propose that, compared to incremental, entity theorists have lower thresholds to form strong attitudes: in contrast to incremental, entity theorists need smaller amount of information on the target objects when forming strong attitudes.