42 Pages Posted: 6 Aug 2011

Date Written: June 14, 2011

Abstract

Prior research theorizes that ambivalence makes opinions about an object unreliable in the sense of being haphazard, unpredictable, or variable. We propose an alternative account of the effects of ambivalence on attitudes. We posit that people who are ambivalent about an issue split the difference between their conflicting considerations by taking a position near the middle of the bipolar opinion scale, which reflects a moderate attitude. We show how the widely-used method of modeling the supposed variability of ambivalent opinions conflates variability and moderation. We address this problem by demonstrating how we can model variability and moderation of attitudes separately, without this confound. Using this appropriate strategy in analyses involving four datasets and three policy domains, our results show that ambivalence is associated with moderate, not variable, attitudes. We show that ambivalence actually makes opinions less variable - not more - moving attitudes quite predictably toward the middle of the response scale.