Treffer: Interaction of Social Deference and Cognitive Processing in the Prediction of Acquiescence

Acquiescence is the tendency of participants to shift their responses to agreement. Lechner et al. (2019) introduced the following mechanisms of acquiescence: social deference and cognitive processing. We added their interaction into a theoretical framework. The sample consists of 557 participants. We found significant medium strong relationship between acquiescence and social deference and significant but negligible correlation between acquiescence and selective attention, perception of task difficulty, and cognitive reflection, and non-significant relationships between acquiescence, verbal cognitive reflection, and general cognitive factor. We did not find significant interactions between social deference and factors of cognitive processing. It is possible that the selected cognitive factors do not play a role in explaining acquiescence. Future studies should focus on finding another way of measuring task difficulty.

As Provided