Our two-stage framework predicts that, during impression formation, individuals who hold ambivalent attitudes toward an issue are influenced by other sources regardless of their perceived reliability on the target issue. Less ambivalent individuals are presumed likely to check the reliability of the message’s source before accepting it. Experiment 1 finds that highly ambivalent participants do not differentiate between a more versus less reliable source when forming impressions of a political candidate, whereas less ambivalent participants do. Experiments 2 and 3 show that less ambivalent individuals’ attitudes can be influenced by less reliable sources if participants are unaware of this influence or if participants’ cognitive resources are curtailed.


*Martin R. Zemborain is assistant professor of marketing at IAE Management and Business School, Austral University, Mariano Acosta s/nro. Y Ruta Nac. 8 (1629) Pilar, Buenos Aires, Argentina (mzemborain@iae.edu.ar). Gita Venkataramani Johar is Meyer Feldberg Professor of Business at the
Graduate School of Business, Columbia University, 3022 Broadway, New York, NY 10027 (gvj1@columbia.edu). The authors contributed equally to this article and gratefully acknowledge helpful suggestions on earlier versions of the manuscript from the editor and two reviewers. This research was supported by the Columbia Business School research fund and was conducted while the first author was a doctoral student at Columbia University.

download full journal