Attitude Dissimulation and Persuasion Gregory R. Maio University of Wales at Cardiff, UK and James M. Olson University of Western Ontario, Canada Received: March 12, 1997; revised: July 25, 1997; accepted: November 17, 1997 Because people’s true attitudes toward an object become more accessible immediately after indicating an attitude that they know to be false, we predicted that such attitude dissimulation might paradoxically cause the true attitude to have a stronger effect on subsequent judgments. In two experiments, participants were randomly assigned to express false, true, or no attitudes toward Albert Einstein. Next, in an ostensibly separate study, participants read a persuasive message describing Einstein’s dislike for a particular technology and then rated their attitude toward this technology. As expected, results indicated that participants who had previously indicated false or true attitudes toward Einstein indicated more dislike for the technology than participants who had not previously expressed attitudes toward him. A second experiment replicated the effect of attitude dissimulation using a manipulation that was similar to that employed in cognitive dissonance experiments. Possible effects of falsely indicating ‘‘politically correct’’ atti- tudes are discussed.  1998 Academic Press Attitudes can be defined as associations in memory between objects and evaluations (Fazio, 1990; Olson & Zanna, 1993). For example, opera fans who like Luciano Pavarotti have formed an internal association between the evaluation ‘‘like’’and the attitude object ‘‘Luciano Pavarotti.’’Consequently, if asked about Pavarotti, fans can recall and express liking for him. The research reported in this paper was funded by a research grant to the second author and was conducted while the first author was supported by a doctoral fellowship, both from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. We thank Russell Fazio, Richard Petty,Yaacov Trope, Mark Zanna, and several anonymous reviewers for their comments on a previous version of this paper. Address correspondence and reprint requests to Greg Maio, School of Psychology, Cardiff University of Wales, Cardiff, Wales, UK CF1 3YG. JOURNAL OF EXPERIMENTAL SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY 34, 182–201 (1998) ARTICLE NO. JS971348 182 0022-1031/98 $25.00 Copyright  1998 by Academic Press All rights of reproduction in any form reserved.