When You Are Blue, Less Is True: The Impact of Affect on Validity Judgments

It is proposed that people associate validity with positivity and invalidity with negativity and that these associations make people more likely to judge information to be valid when experiencing positive affect than when experiencing negative affect. In Experiment l, participants' responses on an Implicit Association Test (IAT) demonstrated strong associations between positivity and validity and between negativity and invalidity. In Experiment 2, participants primed with positive affect were more likely than participants primed with negative affect to assess statements as valid. This experiment also suggests that an affect-priming mechanism is responsible for the impact of affect on validity judgments. The implications of these findings for self-serving judgments and for processing fluency phenomena are discussed.

Name thesis:degree_name

Ph.D.

Level thesis:degree_level

Dissertation

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Psychology

Grantor

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Year dc:date

2015

Author dc:creator

• Evans, Ralph Matthew

Contributors dc:contributor

• Justin Kruger

• Psychology, Social

Language dc:language

eng

Identifier

(MiAaPQ)AAI3130913

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:www.ideals.illinois.edu:2142/82054