Ambivalence and Economic Perceptions.

The growing literature on ambivalence has typically relied on theories about the survey response to understand ambivalence's effects. While valuable, we believe these theories fail to capture the motivational implications of ambivalence. In this paper, we propose and test a motivational theory of ambivalence. Drawing on extensive research in social and political psychology, we argue that ambivalent individuals are driven by accuracy goals while univalent individuals are driven by directional goals. One implication of this theory is that objective information should carry more weight for ambivalent than for univalent individuals. We test this implication by considering the impact of objective economic data on individuals with high versus low levels of ambivalence toward the Democratic and Republican parties. Consistent with our theory, we find that ambivalent individuals place greater weight on objective economic data when forming retrospective economic evaluations. We discuss the aggregate effect of this finding, as well as its normative implications. ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]