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Violating Conversational Conventions Disrupts Cognitive Processing of Attitude Questions☆,☆☆

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Abstract

This research distinguishes conversational norms from conversational conventions and tests the notion that violation of conversational conventions in attitude questions disrupts processing and reduces data quality. Our first study showed that in questions with simple, dichotomous affirmative and negative response alternatives, respondents expect the affirmative response alternative to be offered before the negative one. Four studies showed that violating this convention disrupts cognitive processing. Respondents took longer to answer questions asked unconventionally, and their answers were less predictable by their attitudinal dispositions and their demographic characteristics. In addition, answers were less responsive to manipulation of a key feature of an object of judgment. Another study ruled out a possible alternative explanation for the effect (an increase in disconfirmatory thinking) and documented that convention violation led people to generate more thoughts irrelevant to the question's topic. These disruption effects were reliable only among people for whom the cognitive work entailed by generating optimal answers to questions was most difficult.

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    • ☆

    The authors thank Stanley Presser, Raymond Kopp, W. Michael Hanemann, Paul Ruud, V. Kerry Smith, Michael Conaway, Kerry Martin, Richard Bishop, Trudy Cameron, Carol Jones, Norman Meade, Pierre Du Vair, Alan Randall, Penny Visser, Joanne Miller, George Bizer, and Dean Lacy for their help and advice throughout this project. We also thank David Moore and the Gallup Organization for providing access to the data analyzed in Study 6. The work described in this paper was funded in part by National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Contract 50-DGNC-1-00007 and by a grant under the Cooperative Research and Training Program sponsored by the Minerals Management Service, U.S. Department of the Interior, and the Coastal Marine Institute, University of California (Task 12390). The research reported here was conducted partly while the second author was a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (supported by NSF Grant SBR-9022192).

    ☆☆

    Address correspondence and reprint requests to Allyson L. Holbrook or Jon A. Krosnick, Department of Psychology, The Ohio State University, 1885 Neil Avenue, Columbus, Ohio 43210. E-mail: [email protected] or [email protected].

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