New Study Looks to Solve Question of Why Some Love Everything, Others Nothing

In a new study designed to solve the question as to why some individuals seem to adopt a general dislike of a wide variety of things and others a general like, researchers cite the difference as lying not in the objects but the personality that each person brings to them -- a trait coined "dispositional attitude."

Those with a positive dispositional attitude are more likely to see things in a favorable light than those with a negative dispositional attitude, the study, published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, states.

"The dispositional attitude construct represents a new perspective in which attitudes are not simply a function of the properties of the stimuli under consideration, but are also a function of the properties of the evaluator," the authors wrote. "[For example], at first glance, it may not seem useful to know someone's feelings about architecture when assessing their feelings about health care. After all, health care and architecture are independent stimuli with unique sets of properties, so attitudes toward these objects should also be independent."

However, they continue, there is one important variable that a person's attitudes will always have in common, and that's the person who formed them.

"Some people may simply be more prone to focusing on positive features and others on negative features," co-author Justin Hepler of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign said.

In the course of their study, Hepler and co-author Dolores Albarracín, a professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, asked people to record their attitudes toward a wide variety of unrelated stimuli, including architecture, soccer, showers and politics. Responses were then averaged together to calculate each person's dispositional attitude, the theory being that if individuals differ generally in their level of like or dislike of objects, their perception toward independent objects may be related.

Sure enough, the researchers found that people with positive dispositional attitudes were more open than those with negative attitudes, as seen in a greater willingness to buy new products, get vaccines, recycle and drive carefully, among other behaviors deemed positive.

"This surprising and novel discovery expands attitude theory by demonstrating that an attitude is not simply a function of an object's properties, but it is also a function of the properties of the individual who evaluates the object," Hepler and Albarracín concluded . "Overall, the present research provides clear support for the dispositional attitude as a meaningful construct that has important implications for attitude theory and research."