Effects of evaluative (in-)consistency and perceived self-efficacy on attitude formation *This research was supported by Grant Jo 182/2 from the “Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG)”. The present experiments were conducted in partial fullfilment of the first author's requirements for a doctoral degree at the University of Tübingen, under the direction of the other two authors. We would like to thank Jörg Conzelmann, Denis Fischer, Anja Rüther, Mechthild Weber, and Felix Weichholt for carrying out the experiments, Diana Raysz, and several anonymous reviewers for their comments on an earlier draft of this paper.

In accordance with dual-process theories of attitude change, we predict that attitude judgments about unfamiliar objects are affected by the evaluative inconsistency of relevant attributes. Drawing upon self-efficacy theory, we further predict that individuals' perceived self-efficacy moderates the effect of inconsistency on attitude latencies: Individuals with high perceived self-efficacy in regard to systematic processing are expected to persist in their judgmental process and to show deliberative processing when information is inconsistent but not when it is consistently positive or consistently negative. Evaluatively consistent information should lead to an elimination of or even a reversal of this difference between high- and low-efficacy individuals. The results of two experiments are supportive of these hypotheses.