False Memories Resulting from a Choice Blindness Task Shapes Future Political Attitudes

Sammanfattning: In many attitude theories, it is commonly assumed that what we believe in is partly based on our own past actions, and that these actions shape our present opinion towards an issue. This suggests that how one remembers and represents past deci-sions could have an instigating role in establishing future at-titudes. However, the way attitudes change over time has gen-erally been explained by either self-perception processes or from resolving internal motivational conflicts. The aim of this thesis is to go beyond this conception of attitude change and explore an alternative explanation: that attitudes are liable to the dynamics and processes of memory. To do this, partici-pants stated their opinions on political issues, and the Choice Blindness Paradigm was used to manipulate some of their pre-vious responses to indicate an opposite position. Participants were then asked to remember their previous responses to-gether with their current opinion on the issue directly after the manipulation and one day later to investigate how memories of past attitudes are influenced when accepting the false feed-back. Specifically, to test whether the choice blindness manip-ulation creates a false memory of a past attitude which partic-ipants’ uses when generating their future response on a polit-ical statement. The result showed that participants’ memory responses were strongly influenced by the manipulation and moved in direction of the false feedback, both directly follow-ing the manipulation as well as one day later. This effect was also found for attitude responses in which participants exhib-ited lasting shifts in attitudes. Additionally, the memory of past attitudes was a significant predictor for later attitude shifts and explained a large portion of variance in attitude change. These findings provide evidence that attitude change as well as choice blindness may result from memory mechanisms. And helps to understand how environmental forces and memory processes can interact in shaping future attitudes.