Date of Award

Fall 1-1-2025

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department

Psychology

First Advisor

Ferguson, Melissa

Abstract

People routinely learn new information that challenges their impressions of others, yet these impressions are not always updated. This dissertation investigates the conditions under which people retain or update their self-reported explicit and spontaneously activated implicit impressions in response to novel counterattitudinal information. It consists of three bodies of work showcasing the cognitive and contextual factors that lead to evaluative inertia or updating. First, it shows that people can make context-based inferences to retain their implicit impression of others, highlighting the role of higher processes in implicit impression updating. Second, it investigates what happens to initial impressions once they are updated, revealing that traces of initial impressions can linger and resurface even after seemingly effective updating. Finally, it explores what happens to people's pre-existing social group attitudes once they arrive in a new cultural context and over the course of a year of acculturation. Together, these three bodies of work offer a nuanced account of evaluative inertia and updating.

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