Ra. Schuette et Rh. Fazio, ATTITUDE ACCESSIBILITY AND MOTIVATION AS DETERMINANTS OF BIASED PROCESSING - A TEST OF THE MODE MODEL, Personality & social psychology bulletin, 21(7), 1995, pp. 704-710
The roles of attitude accessibility and motivation in the biased proce
ssing of information were examined as a test of the MODE model. Subjec
ts evaluated two studies with conflicting conclusions regarding capita
l punishment's crime deterrence efficacy. Attitude accessibility was m
anipulated by having subjects express their death penalty attitudes ei
ther once (low accessibility) or repeatedly (high accessibility) durin
g an initial phase of the experiment. Motivation was manipulated via f
ear of invalidity; half the subjects were told their evaluations of th
e capital punishment studies would be publicly compared to an expert p
anel's conclusions. The relation between attitude and judgment was fou
nd to depend on both attitude accessibility and motivation. Judgments
were more attitudinally congruent in the low-fear-of-invalidity/repeat
ed-expression condition than in the other conditions.