So here, looking at the flexible merit standard model, I'm going to focus on two effects that involve other characteristics of the situation that tend to activate the reciprocity norm. Specifically, I'll be looking into the reciprocal open-mindedness effect and the reciprocal politeness effect. In both cases, some situational cue activates the normal reciprocity which in turn has implications and therefore influences situation specific open-minded cognition. First, I'm going to turn to the reciprocal open-mindedness effect in conversation. Here, we argue that there is a reciprocity norm in conversation that we all follow pretty automatically and intuitively, which is that we feel obligated, we should feel obligated to be open-minded when we're talking to someone who openly considers our viewpoints, but not so much when talking to someone who does not openly consider our own viewpoints. So, in other words, if someone is open-minded when listening to me express my viewpoints, I feel normatively obligated to return the favor, to be open-minded when listening to their viewpoints. But if someone is close-minded when listening to me express my viewpoints, I feel that I'm entitled to be close-minded when listening to their viewpoints. So, a very important situational cue is to what extent is the person I'm talking to open or close-minded toward me? So we tested this rather simple idea again, in an experiment. In this experiment, participants were asked to first imagine that you're having a conversation with a person at a party. So, this person disagrees with you fundamentally on some issue. Half of the people are put in situation one. In this particular situation, the conversation partner is open-minded. That is, despite the fact that you both disagree on this issue. Nevertheless, your conversation partner tells you that he would like to take your ideas seriously and it seems like he is carefully listening to you in an open-minded manner. The other half of the people in the experiment are assigned to a different condition or a different situation. Situation number two, where the conversation partner is close-minded. In this case, the conversation partner that you're supposed to imagine you're talking to with at the party tells you that he can't really take your ideas seriously. It doesn't even seem like he's listening, he tends to look at his cell phone and things of that nature. Later during the party, regardless of which situation you're in, all participants later during the party are told to imagine they encounter this person again, and suddenly this other person, the conversation partner starts to talk to you, the participant in the experiment, and describe his viewpoints on various political issues. So now the question is, if you're the participant, do you think in this situation one should be open-minded, is one dependent variable or one thing that we measured. And also, would you personally be open-minded in this particular situation? So, the left side we showed the results for the one should ratings and as predicted, we obtained the reciprocal open-mindedness effect. That is, if your conversation partner had been open-minded toward you, you returned the favor and were open-minded toward your conversation partner later in the party. And again, we performed a mediational analysis, and again consistent with a flexible merit standard model, this manipulation of a situational characteristic that is having either a closed-minded or open-minded conversational partner— which is a situational cue— causally influenced 'One should' ratings, that is, situation specific open-minded normative perceptions, which in turn causally influenced 'I would' ratings, that is, situation specific open-minded cognition. So, we obtained evidence just a moment ago as I showed you of the reciprocal open-mindedness effect. We then examined a more general but related to effect which is the reciprocal, what we call the reciprocal politeness effect. Again, the effect we argue is tied to the reciprocity norm. And the idea here is quite simply that although open-mindedness and closed-mindedness in some sense occurs in the privacy of our own mind, we still construe open-mindedness as a polite response and closed-mindedness as an impolite response. Consequently, the reciprocity norm according to our view, will influence the degree to which we are open-minded even when we respond to polite or impolite behavior that does not specifically convey open or closed-mindedness. So in other words, if someone is polite to me in any fashion, I will therefore feel normatively obligated to be open-minded when listening to them express their viewpoints. On the other hand, if someone is impolite to me in any fashion, I will feel that I am entitled to be close-minded when listening to their viewpoints. We tested this second hypothesis again with an experiment. Again, all participants were asked initially to imagine you encounter a person at a party. Half of the people were put in situation one where the person they encountered is polite. Here, this person they just meet shakes their hand, looks them in the eye, says 'it's a pleasure to meet you.' He does accidentally bump into you at the party but importantly apologizes for doing so. He's a polite person. Situation two, you're supposed to imagine you're in a situation where you encounter a person who is impolite. You reach out to shake his hand, but he ignores you. He cuts in front of you in line to get some food. He bumps into you, he does not apologize. This is an impolite person at the party. Later during the party, they encounter this same person who approaches them and talks to them and describes his viewpoints on various issues. So the question is, to what extent do the people in this experiment think that one should be open-minded toward this person? And also to what extent do they personally say they would be open-minded with regard to this person? Again, we obtained the predicted effect. In this case, we call it the reciprocal politeness effect. Regardless of whether we looked at 'One should' ratings or 'I personally would' ratings, in both cases, open-mindedness ratings were higher when the conversation partner was polite than when the conversation partner was impolite just as we predicted. And that mediational analysis was confirmed statistically as shown at the bottom of this slide. In conclusion, open-minded cognition varies across situations as it did for the message tenability effect, but here it's across situations depending upon the type of person you're talking to and how they act. Your reciprocal open-mindedness effect emerges if you are conversing with someone who's open-minded toward you, you feel obligated to be open minded toward them, and therefore you are open minded toward them. If they're close minded toward you, you feel as though you're entitled to be close-minded toward them. We also obtained evidence of the reciprocal politeness effect. If someone is polite toward me, I feel obligated to be open-minded when listening to them speak. However, if someone is impolite toward me, I feel as though I'm entitled to be close-minded when listening to them speak. These reciprocity effects that I just described on open-minded cognition are mediated in part by that activated normative standard.
