Do attitudes affect memory? Tests of the congeniality hypothesis

Social psychologists have usually hypothesized that attitudinal selectivity biases people's memory in favor of information that is congenial to their attitudes, because they are motivated to defend their attitudes against unc ongenial information. However, our meta-analysis found that such effects ha ve been only inconsistently obtained. One reason for these inconsistencies is that the defense of attitudes against attacks does not necessarily entai l avoiding the uncongenial information. As shown by our experiments, people often expose themselves to attitudinally uncongenial information, attend t o it, scrutinize it carefully, encode it accurately, and remember it fairly well, even though they dislike the information and are not persuaded by it . Given sufficient motivation and capacity, people mount an active defense that enhances memory for the information.