The Effects of Social Power and Preexisting Attitudes on Public and Private Responses to an Induced Attitude

Abstract

A set ofpredictions was developed in which the occurrence of private acceptance, given that public compliance has been obtained, is viewed as a function of both the type of socialpower used by the influencing agent, and the magnitude of preexisting opposing attitudes within the individual being influenced. The attitude of 116 introductory psychology students toward the course requirement that they serve as subjects in psychology experiments was used to test the main predictions. Although these predictions were not supported by the data, further analysis uncovered the following results concerning the occurrence of private acceptance: (a) those subjects with a greater discrepancy between preexisting opposing attitude and induced attitude showed less private acceptance than those with less discrepancy, and (b) females showed more private acceptance when the influencing agent used reward power rather than referent power, while males showed more private acceptance when the agent used referent power rather than reward power.