Desired attitudes guide actual attitude change*

Whereas actual attitudes represent people's evaluations of specific objects as being good or bad, desired attitudes represent the attitude positions that people wish they held. Previous work has established that desired attitudes can have psychological consequences, but has not yet tested the extent to which desired attitudes can predict actual attitude change. In five datasets involving a variety of populations and procedural variations, we explored how political and moral factors motivate people to form desired attitudes distinct from their actual attitudes. These desired attitudes then predicted actual attitude change occurring after the formation of the desired attitudes, even though participants received no new information about the object. The present work demonstrates an additional value of the desired attitude construct: its ability to anticipate how people's attitudes will shift in the future.