Promoting the Ambiguity of a Public Health Crisis Can Facilitate Adjustment: The Joint Influence of an Ambiguous Message Focus and Implicit Self-Theories.

In the early stage of a novel public health crisis, such as an infectious disease, there is often uncertainty about whether the crisis will be permanent. We find that emphasizing the potential permanency of the situation surrounding the crisis can backfire, depending on the implicit self-theory held by people. Data collected during the COVID-19 outbreak showed that when the crisis situation was communicated as potentially being permanent in nature, entity theorists, who view personal qualities as fixed, were more reluctant to adjust to it than incremental theorists, who view personal qualities as malleable. The results were consistent whether implicit self-theory was measured as an individual difference factor (study 1) or manipulated (study 2). We reason that entity and incremental theorists make different inferences about what is required to adjust under the potentially permanent crisis situation: Entity theorists tend to infer that it involves substantial change in the self, whereas incremental theorists tend to infer that it involves crisis-specific behavioral changes. Importantly, we find that communicating ambiguity by leaving open the possibility of two opposing outcomes - the crisis situation may be permanent or temporary - effectively increases entity theorists' intentions to adjust by encouraging them to infer that adjusting to the crisis involves crisis-specific behavioral changes (study 2).

Unwarranted philosophical assumptions in research on ANS.

Clarke and Beck import certain assumptions about the nature of numbers. Although these are widespread within research on number cognition, they are highly contentious among philosophers of mathematics. In this commentary, we isolate and critically evaluate one core assumption: the identity thesis.

Coping with fear through suppression and avoidance of threatening information.

Fear appeal communications are widely used by social marketers in their efforts to persuade individuals to refrain from engaging in risky behaviors. The present research shows that exposure to a fear appeal can lead to the suppression of concepts semantically related to the threat and bias attentional resources away from threat-relevant information. Participants in the experimental condition viewed a fear appeal advertisement depicting the negative consequences of drinking and driving. The results of a reaction time task showed inhibited responses to words semantically related to drinking (e.g., beer, party) relative to a baseline group that controlled for priming effects (Experiment 1a) and level of fear (Experiment 1b). Furthermore, those in the experimental condition were shown to adopt an attention avoidance processing style, decreasing attention to alcohol-related advertisements appearing in a mock magazine (Experiments 2a and 2b). Because processing of alcohol-related advertising has been linked previously to an increase in drinking and driving, inhibited processing of such advertisements suggests a positive outcome of suppression effects. This contrasts with prior claims suggesting that suppression is counter to prevention-based efforts.

Intentional forgetting as a facilitator for recalling new product attributes.

When market changes alter what product attributes are deemed important, consumers may intentionally try to forget old product information in an attempt to remember new product information. In Experiment 1, the authors demonstrated that intentional forgetting of this nature temporarily inhibits retrieval of old product information and leads to a benefit to memory for new product information. The results show that, after a short delay, benefits continue in the absence of costs, which is supportive of a multiple-process account of intentional forgetting. Experiment 2 extends these effects using an advertising message to stimulate forgetting. Across both experiments, results also show that brand preference is based on learning of new attribute information.