ABSTRACT

Durganand Sinha had 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 had also found that the Darjeeling people affected by the 1950 landslide spread rumors to make sense of their surroundings via cognitive and emotional responses (Sinha, 1952). In this chapter, the author pays his 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 correctness of the participant’s views are objectively unverifiable rather than verifiable matches with the evidence for efforts about meaning among the Darjeeling residents in the absence of reliable 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 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.

Keywords: cognition, emotion, parallel-mediation, sequential-mediation, validation