Abstract
Social interactions often involve attempts to deal with information that is known to be invalid while at the same time using information that is known to be valid. To explore this process, we compare the success of discounting when the source of the to-be-ignored message also provides valid information with a case in which the to-be-used and the to-be-ignored messages are provided by different sources. It is found that when attempting to ignore invalid messages, receivers tend to undermine the impact of the valid messages when both types of messages are attributed to the same source. This does not happen when the valid and invalid messages are attributed to different sources. The study explores several mechanisms that may lead to this effect. It appears that ignoring one message undermines receivers' ability to use another message from the same source because of the associative links that are formed between the valid and the invalid messages.
| Original language | American English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 327-345 |
| Number of pages | 19 |
| Journal | Journal of Experimental Social Psychology |
| Volume | 35 |
| Issue number | 4 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - Jul 1999 |
Bibliographical note
Funding Information:Preparation of this paper was supported by grants from the United States–Israel Binational Science Foundation and the Israel Science Foundation. We thank Tamar Evron, Zohar Gilula, and Michal Ilan for their help in running the experiments.