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Healthy Skepticism Library item: 11673

Warning: This library includes all items relevant to health product marketing that we are aware of regardless of quality. Often we do not agree with all or part of the contents.

 

Publication type: Journal Article

Tormala ZL, Falces C, Brinol P, Petty RE.
Ease of retrieval effects in social judgment: the role of unrequested cognitions.
J Pers Soc Psychol 2007 Aug; 93:(2):143-57
http://content.apa.org/journals/psp/93/2/143


Abstract:

The present research explores a new mechanism for ease of retrieval effects in social judgment. It is suggested that in the most common ease of retrieval paradigm, when it is difficult for people to generate or retrieve the specific type of cognition requested (e.g., positive thoughts about an issue or memories of assertive behavior), they are more likely to spontaneously generate or retrieve unrequested cognitions (e.g., negative thoughts about the issue or memories of unassertive behavior), and the presence of these unrequested cognitions can affect social judgment. In 4 experiments, participants were asked to generate a high (difficult) or low (easy) number of cognitions in a given direction. Across experiments, when participants were asked to generate a high number of cognitions, they also had more unrequested cognitions, and these unrequested cognitions played a mediating role in the ease of retrieval effect on judgment. In the 3rd and 4th experiments, this mechanism was found to be independent of previously identified mediators.

Keywords:
MeSH Terms: Attitude Cognition* Humans Judgment* Persuasive Communication Social Behavior*

 

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Far too large a section of the treatment of disease is to-day controlled by the big manufacturing pharmacists, who have enslaved us in a plausible pseudo-science...
The blind faith which some men have in medicines illustrates too often the greatest of all human capacities - the capacity for self deception...
Some one will say, Is this all your science has to tell us? Is this the outcome of decades of good clinical work, of patient study of the disease, of anxious trial in such good faith of so many drugs? Give us back the childlike trust of the fathers in antimony and in the lancet rather than this cold nihilism. Not at all! Let us accept the truth, however unpleasant it may be, and with the death rate staring us in the face, let us not be deceived with vain fancies...
we need a stern, iconoclastic spirit which leads, not to nihilism, but to an active skepticism - not the passive skepticism, born of despair, but the active skepticism born of a knowledge that recognizes its limitations and knows full well that only in this attitude of mind can true progress be made.
- William Osler 1909