THE EFFECT OF ATTITUDE DISSIMULATION ON ATTITUDE ACCESSIBILITY

In two experiments, we examined the effect of attitude dissimulation a nd truthful attitude expression on attitude accessibility, which is th e ease with which an attitude is retrieved from memory. In the first e xperiment, 161 subjects lied about their attitudes toward some attitud e objects and expressed their true attitudes toward other attitude obj ects. Next, as our measure of attitude accessibility, subjects were as ked to express quickly and accurately their true attitudes toward (a) the objects that they had lied about, (b) the objects that they had ev aluated truthfully, and (c) other objects that they had not evaluated at all. Results indicated that both attitude dissimulation and truthfu l attitude expression caused attitudes to become more accessible (i.e. , more quickly recalled) than if the attitudes had not been previously expressed. In the second experiment, we tested the hypothesis that at titude dissimulation increases attitude accessibility only when the di ssimulation causes conscious recall of one's true attitude. Results su pported this hypothesis. The implications of these results for predict ing the effect of lying on attitude-behavior relations is highlighted.