Coherence in Perceptions of a Romantic Relationship

Coherence in Perceptions of a Romantic Relationship Aaron L. Brownstein (aaronb@usc.edu) Department of Psychology, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA, 90089-1061 Stephen J. Read (read@usc.edu) Department of Psychology, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA, 90089-1061 Dan Simon (dsimon@law.usc.edu) School of Law, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA, 90089-0071 in which a subset of mutually consistent elements are highly activated. Drawing on constraint satisfaction systems, researchers have begun to show that cognition involves imposing consistency on related concepts. Simon and colleagues (Holyoak & Simon, 1999; Simon, Pham, Le, & Holyoak, 2001; Simon, Snow, & Read, in press) developed a paradigm showing how, when people think about the issues related to a legal case and then render a verdict, their perceptions of the issues shift to become consistent with their eventual verdict, thereby achieving a coherent understanding of the whole case. The finding that perceptions of issues shift to become consistent with an emerging decision violates two important assumptions of algebraic models of information integration, such as Bayes theorem and Anderson’s (1962) Information Integration Theory. Those models assume that (1) the value of one element is not affected by the values of other elements and that (2) the value of an element is not changed when it is integrated with other elements to arrive at a conclusion. Nevertheless, Simon and colleagues found that during decision making, evaluations of issues related to a legal case shift to become consistent with the emerging decision and with each other. The present research adapts Simon and colleagues’ paradigm to test for coherence outside the legal context. In the first phase (pretest) participants read vignettes describing different couples and ambiguous events in their relationships, and then rated their agreement with statements giving different interpretations of the events. Some of the statements were factual items that involved interpreting the meaning of an event and others were belief items that involved interpreting the general implications of an event. For example, one vignette described how Eric and Daniella spent a day with Daniella’s aunt Rachel, enabling her to observe the couple’s interactions and subsequently report that she thought their relationship was going well. A factual item related to that vignette asks participants to rate the extent to which they think Aunt Rachel’s optimistic impression was correct and a belief item asks them to rate the extent to which they think that, in general, it is possible to get a good sense of a couple’s relationship by observing them for a day. In the second phase participants read a longer story about a couple, Jenny and Mark, that combined all of the issues Abstract When decision makers perceive all issues related to a decision as being consistent with their choice, they achieve coherence. Participants rated their agreement with different views of various issues related to a couple’s relationship. Those who later decided whether the couple would get engaged or break up subsequently reinterpreted the issues to be consistent with their decision. Increasing the importance of the decision, highlighting coherent perspectives, or giving participants a prior preference did not strengthen the coherence shift, but coherence shifts did not occur without the chance to decide, suggesting that they occur in an all or nothing fashion. Individuals with higher need for cognition (Cacioppo & Petty, 1982) achieved a greater degree of coherence among facts associated with the relationship but not among more general beliefs about relationships. Introduction Early social psychologists attempted to develop a general model of cognitive functioning based on consistency maintenance (Festinger, 1957; Heider, 1946; Osgood & Tannenbaum, 1955; Newcomb, 1953). Those theories shared the assumption that cognition involves the interaction among elements, and that those elements tend to settle into stable states characterized by some type of good form, in which similar elements are interconnected and segregated from dissimilar elements. However, early consistency theories narrowly focused on small sets of two (Festinger, 1957) or three (Heider, 1946) elements at a time, and so were unable to represent the larger, more complex situations that people often encounter in their daily lives. More recently, computer based models of multiple constraint satisfaction systems have begun to provide a mechanism for simulating maintenance of consistency throughout large, complex systems (Holyoak & Simon, 1999; Read, Vanman, & Miller, 1997; Simon, Snow, & Read, in press). In these models, units represent cognitive elements and links between units represent relations between elements, with excitatory links representing consistent relations and inhibitory links representing inconsistent relations. Dynamic processing is simulated by allowing units connected by excitatory links to increase each other’s activation and units connected by inhibitory links to decrease each other’s activation until the system settles in to a stable state of coherence, a kind of good form