Too Much Information! The Interplay of Argument Quality and Subjective Difficulty in Attitude Judgment

Paradoxically, people sometimes express weaker attitudes after generating more supporting arguments, a phenomenon usually attributed to subjective difficulty of generating them. We propose, however, that generating too many arguments compromises their evidentiary quality, which additionally explains attitude change. In Studies 1 and 2, Mechanical Turk participants generated 12 arguments supporting social issues. The results showed that, as more arguments were generated, the time of generating them increased, but the self-perceived argument quality declined. Although both correlated with attitudes, and each other, only argument quality uniquely predicted attitudes. Study 3 applied these insights to the “ease of retrieval paradigm,” showing that attitude change associated with generating 12 (versus 3) arguments was mediated by argument quality and its relationship with difficulty, although a main effect of argument number was not observed. The results show how reasoning involves an interplay of cognitive and metacognitive dynamics that produce self-generated attitude change in counterintuitive ways.