Students involved in dating relationships attended four weekly sessions, at which they either introspected about why they felt the way they did about their relationship or introspected about an unrelated topic. As predicted, at Week I people who introspected about reasons brought to mind thoughts that were inconsistent with their initial feelings about their relationships and changed their attitudes in the direction of those reasons. This attitude change persisted throughout the study but did not increase. People in the control condition showed an increasing amount of attitude change at each session, such that by the end of the study they had changed as much as people in the reasons condition. It is suggested that either thinking about reasons or answering detailed questions about a relationship can change the way people construe that relationship, leading to attitude change.

Presents a model arguing that affect and emotion are often formed in an expectation-driven fashion. A pilot study and 2 experiments manipulated undergraduate Ss' affective expectations (e.g., how funny they expected a set of cartoons to be) and whether Ss' expectations were confirmed (e.g., whether the cartoons really were funny). When the value of a stimulus was consistent with an affective expectation, people formed evaluations relatively quickly. Even when the value of a stimulus was discrepant from an affective expectation, people sometimes assimilated the value of the stimulus to their expectations. Other times, such as when making a more fine-grained evaluation of the cartoons, people noticed that they were discrepant from their affective expectations. Under these conditions, people appeared to have more difficulty forming preferences. They took longer to evaluate and spent more time thinking about the cartoons.

The chapter presents evidence consistent with the observations of Roethke and Vargas Llosa that introspection can be disruptive. The focus is on one type of introspection-thinking—the reasons for one's feelings. The chapter demonstrates that this type of thought can cause people to change their minds about the way they feel and lead to a disconnection between their attitudes and their behavior. It is clear that asking people to think about reasons will often produce attitude change, particularly for affectively based attitudes. The direction of this change, however, has been difficult to predict. The chapter explains people who think about reasons and end up with an attitude that is significantly more negative or positive, on the average, than the attitudes of control subjects. The direction of attitude change is difficult to predict, because it is closely related to the hypothesis about the generation of a biased sample of reasons. In the chapter, there are at least two sorts of harmful attitudes that might be changed by thinking about reasons—those that are undesirable from the individual's perspective and those that are undesirable from a societal perspective.

Previous studies have found that asking people to explain the reasons for their attitudes can change these attitudes and lower attitude-behavior consistency. We found that people's knowledge about the attitude object moderates these effects. In a reanalysis of an earlier experiment, we found that analyzing reasons reduced the correlation between dating couples' attitudes toward each other and their break-up rates only for couples who had been dating for a relatively short period of time. In Study 1 analyzing reasons reduced the correlation between undergraduates' attitudes toward a political candidate and the number of fliers for that candidate they were willing to distribute only for those who were unknowledgeable about the candidate. In Study 2 analyzing reasons changed undergraduates' attitudes toward a set of political candidates only for those who were relatively unfamiliar with the candidates. Several possible reasons for the moderating effect of knowledge are discussed.