How Salience of Consistency Norms Affects Individual Differences in Ambivalent Answering in North Americans

Abstract

Previous studies have found a positive relationship between trait dialecticism and ambivalent answering (Church et al., 2012; Hamamura et al., 2008). The current study explored how this relationship is affected for situational personality tests after manipulating the saliency of consistency norms (inconsistency vs. consistency manipulation), and classifying participants‘ reactions to the manipulations (Non-Reactance vs. Reactance). The results indicated that (1) Non-reactant participants showed a strong relationship between dialecticism and ambivalent answering in the inconsistency manipulation, but there was no relationship between the two in the consistency manipulation; and (2) Reactant participants showed a weaker relationship in the inconsistency manipulation, and a strong relationship in the consistency manipulation. In addition to these findings, the results indicated a positive relationship between self-knowledge and ambivalent answering, finding that the inconsistency manipulation significantly attenuates this relationship. Implications for cultural/personality research with experimental manipulations, and how to emphasize individual differences when designing manipulations, are discussed.