Researchers and practitioners want to create opinions that stick. Yet whereas some opinions stay fixed, others are as fleeting as the time it takes to report them. In seven longitudinal studies with more than 20,000 individuals, we found that attitudes based more on emotion are relatively fixed. Whether participants evaluated brand-new Christmas gifts or one of 40 brands, the more emotional their opinion, the less it changed over time, particularly if it was positive. In a word-of-mouth linguistic analysis of 75,000 real-world online reviews, we found that the more emotional consumers are in their first review, the more that attitude persists when they express it again even years later. Finally, more emotion-evoking persuasive messages create attitudes that decay less over time, further establishing emotion’s causal effect. These effects persist above and beyond other attitude-strength attributes. Interestingly, we also found that lay individuals generally fail to appreciate the relation between emotionality and attitude stability.

研究人员和从业者希望创造出具有说服力的观点。然而，尽管有些意见是固定不变的，但有些意见却与报告它们所花费的时间一样稍纵即逝。在七项涉及 20,000 多人的纵向研究中，我们发现更多基于情绪的态度是相对固定的。无论参与者是评估全新的圣诞礼物还是 40 个品牌之一，他们的观点越情绪化，随着时间的推移变化越小，特别是如果它是积极的。在对 75,000 条真实在线评论进行的口耳相传语言分析中，我们发现消费者在他们的第一次评论中越情绪化，即使在多年后再次表达时，这种态度也会更加持久。最后，更多唤起情感的有说服力的信息会产生随着时间推移而减少的态度，进一步建立情感的因果效应。这些影响持续存在于其他态度强度属性之上。有趣的是，我们还发现非专业人士通常无法理解情绪与态度稳定性之间的关系。