Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Exposure to mixed evidence can lead to polarization, oradopting a more extreme version of one’s initial attitude. Onepotential reason for this is attitude congruency bias, ratingevidence that supports one's attitude as stronger than evidencethat undermines it. Here we explore factors associated withthis bias and their relationship to attitude change followingexposure to mixed evidence. We conducted several tests,including an attitude survey on two controversial socialissues, a poll regarding participants’ affective involvement ineach issue, an argument rating task, and assessments ofknowledge about social issues and political sophistication.We replicated the attitude congruency bias. Ratings bias wasassociated with affective involvement, but not with measuresof topic knowledge or political sophistication. Attitudechange was predicted by a linear combination of objectiveargument strength and rating bias. Participants’ sensitivity toobjective argument strength suggests the attitude congruencybias does not inevitably lead to polarization.