Ambivalence

Definition

People like some things yet dislike others, love some people but hate others, and sometimes feel happy and other times sad. From this perspective, feelings—generally referred to as affect, which includes such phenomena as attitudes, emotions, and moods—work in much the same way as temperature. Just as temperature falls along a simple dimension ranging from hot to cold, so, too, does affect fall along a simple dimension ranging from positive to negative.

A closer look, however, reveals that affect may be more complex than it first appears. Consider your attitude toward ice cream. You may like ice cream because it tastes good but also dislike ice cream because that great taste comes at the expense of vast amounts of fat, sugar, and calories. If so, you would have what social psychologists call an ambivalent attitude toward ice cream. That is, you feel good and bad about it, rather than simply good or bad. Many people are ambivalent not only about unhealthy foods but about broccoli and other healthy foods as well. Similarly, many people are ambivalent about such unhealthy behaviors as smoking, as well as such healthy behaviors as exercising. As people who describe themselves as having love/hate relationships know, other people can also be a common source of ambivalence. For instance, many people are ambivalent about U.S. presidents Bill Clinton or George W. Bush. Perhaps people feel ambivalent about politicians because they feel ambivalent about the social issues that politicians debate. In addition to disagreeing with each over such troubling issues as legalized abortion, capital punishment, and civil rights, people often disagree with themselves.

Such instances of ambivalence suggest that the analogy between temperature and affect can be taken only so far. It is impossible for liquids to freeze and boil at the same time, but it appears that people can feel both good and bad about the same object. According to John Cacioppo and Gary Berntson's evaluative space model, one implication is that it is better to think of positive and negative affect as separate dimensions rather than opposite ends of a single dimension ranging from positive to negative. From this perspective, people can feel any pattern of positive and negative affect at the same time, including high levels of both.

Attitudinal Ambivalence

Contemporary interest in ambivalence stems from social psychologists' enduring efforts to understand the nature of attitudes, which refer to people's opinions of people, ideas, and things. Social psychologists have long measured attitudes by asking people to indicate how they feel about attitude objects (e.g., ice cream) [Page 32]on scales with options ranging from extremely good to extremely bad. In his chapter on attitude measurement in the 1968 Handbook of Social Psychology, William Scott pointed out that responses in the middle of bipolar attitude scales are difficult to interpret. Though typically assumed to reflect the absence of positive or negative feeling (i.e., indifference), Scott pointed out that such responses may in fact reflect ambivalence, or the presence of both positive and negative affect.