Ambivalence
Holding strong positive and negative feelings about the same thing at once.
What it means
Ambivalence is the simultaneous presence of opposing evaluations—both favorable and unfavorable—toward the same person, object, or course of action, rather than a simple lukewarm or neutral attitude. It is distinguished from indifference precisely because both the positive and negative components are strong; a person can love and resent the same partner, or want and fear the same promotion. Psychologists separate 'objective' ambivalence, the actual co-existence of conflicting reactions, from 'subjective' ambivalence, the felt tension or discomfort of being torn, and the two do not always track each other. Ambivalent attitudes tend to be less stable, more susceptible to context and framing, slower to translate into action, and more easily swayed by persuasion than univalent ones. The discomfort it generates can motivate effortful, systematic thinking as people try to resolve the conflict, or avoidance and procrastination when they cannot. It matters because much of real attitude life—toward health behaviors, relationships, and big decisions—is genuinely two-sided.
How it is measured
Objective ambivalence is captured by rating the positives and the negatives separately, ignoring each side while judging the other, then combining them with the Griffin formula: the average of the two components minus the gap between them. Two strong, evenly matched reactions score high; two weak ones score low. Subjective ambivalence is measured by simply asking how torn a person feels. The two correlate only modestly, around .36 to .52, leaving most of the variance unexplained. Ng, See and Wallace trace part of the gap to matching: objective ambivalence tracks the felt kind more closely when the message and the topic agree in affective versus cognitive orientation than when one is affective and the other cognitive. A single bipolar scale hides all of this, returning the same midpoint for the torn and the uninterested.
Why it feels uncomfortable
Ambivalence is not intrinsically unpleasant. In van Harreveld's experiments, people holding conflicting evaluations show heightened physiological arousal only when they anticipate committing to one side; conflict that never demands resolution sits quietly. The trigger is the moment both evaluations become accessible at once and the person sees that either choice forfeits something real. The uncertainty that follows, rather than the conflict itself, registers as tension. The MAID and ABC models build on this: the negative affect comes first, and the cognitive and behavioral consequences — extra information search, delay, selective attention to whichever side favors the emerging preference — are attempts to resolve the conflict or to quiet the feeling.
What the evidence shows
The evidence is more contested than the textbook account suggests. Conner and colleagues tested ambivalence and cognitive-affective inconsistency together across prospective studies of diet, smoking initiation and physical activity: each moderated the attitude-behavior relationship alone, but tested simultaneously only inconsistency survived (B = -0.021, 95% CI [-0.033, -0.011]); ambivalence's moderation fell to nil, its interval crossing zero. The two may be measuring much the same thing. Siev and Petty complicated matters further across six studies of sociopolitical attitudes: ambivalence lowered willingness to act in normative ways such as voting, yet raised willingness to endorse extreme action. Being torn does not reliably mean being passive, and the old claim that it simply mutes behavior is too coarse.
Where it shows up
The most striking findings are in health. Holt-Lunstad and Uchino's Social Ambivalence and Disease model treats ambivalent relationships — the relative who is both a source of support and a source of criticism — as their own category rather than a midpoint between good ties and bad ones. They are common, making up roughly half the important people in a typical network, and they track worse outcomes than reliably negative ties on some measures, including higher ambulatory blood pressure in daily life. The proposed mechanism is unpredictability: a consistently difficult person can be braced for, while one who might be warm or might be cutting keeps the stress response idling.
Using it in practice
Measure the two sides separately, and treat the movement that follows as signal rather than noise: it is the structure of the attitude showing itself, not error to be averaged away. Whatever persuasion wins here is fragile, because the opposing evaluation does not go away. In behavior change, forcing a premature commitment reliably generates discomfort, but the discomfort does not have a single destination — the same pressure that sends one person into avoidance and delay can, on Siev and Petty's evidence, push another toward the more extreme option. Which way it breaks is the open question, and it is worth finding out before you apply the pressure; surfacing both sides works better than arguing only the case for change.
Examples
Someone deciding whether to leave a secure but unfulfilling job feels real enthusiasm and real dread about the same move, and keeps postponing the choice.
A smoker who genuinely enjoys smoking and genuinely fears the scan is not lukewarm about quitting; both feelings run hot, which is why his resolve flips with whatever he read that morning.
A supporter feels pride in her club's history and disgust at its new owners; ask her about the club on two different days and you get two opposite answers.
A shopper rates a phone highly on camera and battery while genuinely distrusting the brand's privacy record; she adds it to the cart, removes it, and re-reads reviews for a week.
A resident who both wants the new rail line and resents what it will cost her street is the one who turns up to shout the planning hearing down, while the neighbours who have settled on a side stay home and send a letter.
Key references
- Siev, J. J., & Petty, R. E. (2024). Ambivalent attitudes promote support for extreme political actions. Science Advances, 10, eadn2965. doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.adn2965
- Ng, W. J. R., See, Y. H. M., & Wallace, L. E. (2023). When objective ambivalence predicts subjective ambivalence: An affect-cognition matching perspective. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 49(10), 1495-1510. doi.org/10.1177/01461672221102015
- Conner, M., Wilding, S., van Harreveld, F., & Dalege, J. (2021). Cognitive-affective inconsistency and ambivalence: Impact on the overall attitude-behavior relationship. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 47(4), 673-687. doi.org/10.1177/0146167220945900
- Holt-Lunstad, J., & Uchino, B. N. (2019). Social ambivalence and disease (SAD): A theoretical model aimed at understanding the health implications of ambivalent relationships. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 14(6), 941-966. doi.org/10.1177/1745691619861392
- van Harreveld, F., Nohlen, H. U., & Schneider, I. K. (2015). The ABC of ambivalence: Affective, behavioral, and cognitive consequences of attitudinal conflict. Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 52, 285-324. doi.org/10.1016/bs.aesp.2015.01.002
- van Harreveld, F., van der Pligt, J., & de Liver, Y. N. (2009). The agony of ambivalence and ways to resolve it: Introducing the MAID model. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 13(1), 45-61. doi.org/10.1177/1088868308324518
- van Harreveld, F., Rutjens, B. T., Rotteveel, M., Nordgren, L. F., & van der Pligt, J. (2009). Ambivalence and decisional conflict as a cause of psychological discomfort: Feeling tense before jumping off the fence. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 45(1), 167-173. doi.org/10.1016/j.jesp.2008.08.015