Validating Cognitive and Emotional Urges in Comprehending One’s Surroundings: The Case of Attraction from Attitudes

Durganand Sinha found that attitudes formed from a preceding experience influenced participants’ responses to the succeeding one in a laboratory experiment on memory (Davis & Sinha, 1950). He also found that the people of Darjeeling who were affected by the landslide in 1950 had spread rumours to make sense of their surroundings via cognitive and emotional responses (Sinha, 1952). In this article, the author pays tributes to Sinha by making a new case for the importance of attitudes-and-attraction experiments in bolstering his earlier findings. That attitude similarity effects on attraction are stronger when the correctness of the participant’s views is objectively unverifiable rather than verifiable matches with the evidence for efforts about meaning among the Darjeeling residents in the absence of information. Likewise, validation of one’s attitudes by peers and then experiencing positive affect in attraction represent the very same respective cognitive and emotional urges of the Darjeeling people during the post-landslide period. These findings jointly validate Sinha’s views on the prevalence of attitude-driven responding, fusion between responses and sequential relation between cognitive and emotional urges in everyday life.