Social Cognition, Vol. 29, No. 5, 2011, pp. 577–611 577 © 2011 Guilford Publications, Inc. The study was supported in part by European Commission Grant FP6-NEST: EYEWITMEM; 43460. We thank Dana Klein and Rinat Gill for their help in the analyses, and Hila Sorka for conducting the experiments. Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Asher Koriat, Department of Psychology, Haifa University, Haifa 31905, Israel. E-mail: akoriat@research.haifa.ac.il. KORIAT AND ADIV THE CONSTRUCTION OF ATTITUDINAL JUDGMENTS THE CONSTRUCTION OF ATTITUDINAL JUDGMENTS: EVIDENCE FROM ATTITUDE CERTAINTY AND RESPONSE LATENCY Asher Koriat and Shiri Adiv University of Haifa Some researchers regard social attitudes as enduring predispositions, whereas others argue that they are constructed on the spot on the basis of accessible information. According to the sampling model proposed, cer- tainty in one’s attitude and the latency of forming that attitude track the on- line construction of the attitude and provide clues to the stable and variable contributions to attitude construction. An attitudinal judgment is based on a sample of accessible representations drawn from a large base of repre- sentations that are associated with the attitude object. Respondents behave like intuitive statisticians who infer the central tendency of a population on the basis of a small sample, and their certainty relects the likelihood that a new sample will yield the same evaluation. Results on within-person consistency and cross-person consensus provided support for the model. Judgments that deviated from the person’s own modal judgment or from the consensually held judgment took relatively longer to form and were as- sociated with relatively lower conidence, presumably because they were based on non-representative samples. The effects of social consensus were found in the absence of any overt forces toward social conformity. There has been a great deal of interest in the study of attitude strength (see Petty & Krosnick, 1995). Underlying this interest is the assumption that attitude strength determines the extent to which an attitude is translated into action. Indeed, re- sults suggest that strong attitudes have greater influence on thought and behavior than weak attitudes (see Davidson, Yantis, Norwood, & Montano, 1985; Fazio & Zanna, 1978; Krosnick & Abelson, 1992; Krosnick, Boninger, Chuang, Berent, & Carnot, 1993). In the present study we focus on two indexes of attitude strength— the degree of certainty with which an attitude is held, and the speed with which