The pressure and the lack of cognitive resource: evidences for duality of attitudes

When facing socially sensitive issues, people do not often express their real attitudes because of social pressure. The model of dual attitudes is one of the theories that try to explain the phenomenon. According to the theory, the classification of separation patterns between the two attitudes: suppression, independence, motivated override, and automatic override. Recent studies have presented these types of separations in two attitudes indirectly, but direct experimental evidence still is demanded in social attitude research. The present research tries to give such direct evidence and accordingly designs two studies to identify the four kinds of separations above. In the first study, we examine the relationship of the independent and repressed between implicit attitudes and explicit attitudes with cognitive fatigues. In the second study, we consider the rest two types, the motivated and automatic overridden. This paper proposes an experimental design to test attitude duality and explore the deep psychological mechanisms of how cognitive resources and levels of social pressures affect people's social attitudes and behaviors, which can explain the phenomena associated with attitude dissociation, and the analysis of experimental results suggests that dual attitude theory is better than other models to explain this effect in simple and clarity way.