SOME TESTS OF THE DISTINCTION BETWEEN COGNITIVE AND AFFECTIVE BELIEFS

Five experiments tested the distinction between affective and cognitiv e beliefs. Experiments 1 and 2 employed a traditional factor analytic paradigm to show that affective and cognitive items loaded on separate dimensions and that these separate dimensions had different implicati ons for other variables. Experiment 3 made use of a recall paradigm to show that when people have to make behavioral decisions, they associa te affective beliefs to other affective ones, and cognitive beliefs to other cognitive ones. The results indicated that participants' recall protocols were clustered by belief type when they had previously been asked to make a behavioral decision, but not in various control condi tions. Finally, Experiments 4-5 demonstrated that such clustering can be obtained with people's self-generated beliefs. Findings are interpr eted in terms of a new account of the relationship between affective a nd cognitive beliefs-the ''associative hypothesis.'' Implications of t his hypothesis for future research are outlined, (C) 1998 Academic Pre ss.