Two studies examined the impact of subjective experiences on reports of attitude certainty, intensity, and importance. In Study 1, participants with moderate or extreme attitudes toward doctor-assisted suicide generated three (easy) or seven (hard) arguments that either supported or countered their opinion toward the issue prior to indicating the strength of their attitude. Participants with moderate attitudes rated their opinions as more intense, personally important, and held with greater certainty when they had generated either a small number of supporting arguments or a large number of opposing arguments. Ratings provided by individuals with extreme attitudes were unaffected by the argument generation task. In Study 2, the impact of ease of recall on strength-related judgments was eliminated when it was rendered nondiagnostic by a misattribution manipulation. Implications of these findings for attitude strength and other judgmental phenomena are discussed.
Get full access to this article
View all access options for this article.
References
1.
Abelson, R. P. (1995). Attitude extremity. In R. E. Petty & J. A. Krosnick (Eds.), Attitude strength: Antecedents and consequences (pp. 25-42). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
2.
Allport, F. H. , & Hartman, D. A. (1925). The measurement and motivation of atypical opinion in a certain group. American Political Science Review, 19, 735-760.
3.
Bassili, J. N. (1993). Response latency versus certainty as indexes of the strength of voting intentions in a CATI survey. Public Opinion Quarterly, 57, 54-61.
4.
Bassili, J. N. (1996a). The how and why of response latency measurement in telephone surveys. In N. Schwarz & S. Sudman (Eds.), Answering questions: Methodology for determining cognitive and communicative processes in survey research (pp. 319-346). San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
5.
Bassili, J. N. (1996b). Meta-judgmental versus operative indexes of psychological attributes: The case of measures of attitude strength. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 71, 637-653.
6.
Boninger, D. S. , Krosnick, J. A., & Berent, M. K. (1995). The causes of attitude importance: Self-interest, social identification, and values. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 68, 61-80.
7.
Chaiken, S. , Liberman, A., & Eagly, A. H. (1989). Heuristic and systematic processing within and beyond the persuasion context. In J. S. Uleman & J. A. Bargh (Eds.), Unintended thought (pp. 212-252). New York: Guilford.
8.
Chaiken, S. , & Trope, Y. (Eds.). (in press). Dual process models in social psychology. New York: Guilford.
9.
Dijksterhuis, A. , Macrae, C. N., & Haddock, G. (1999). When recollective experiences matter: Subjective ease of retrieval and stereotyping. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 25, 760-768.
10.
Downing, J. W. , Judd, C. M., & Brauer, M. (1992). Effects of repeated expressions on attitude extremity. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 63, 17-29.
11.
Eagly, A. H. , & Chaiken, S. (1993). The psychology of attitudes. Fort Worth, TX: Harcourt Brace.
12.
Erber, M. W. , Hodges, S. D., & Wilson, T. D. (1995). Attitude strength, attitude stability, and the effects of analyzing reasons. In R. E. Petty & J. A. Krosnick (Eds.), Attitude strength: Antecedents and consequences (pp. 433-454). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
13.
Fazio, R. H. (1995). Attitudes as object-evaluation associations: Determinants consequences, and correlates of attitude accessibility. In R. E. Petty & J. A. Krosnick (Eds.), Attitude strength: Antecedents and consequences (pp. 247-282). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
14.
Fazio, R. H. , & Zanna, M. P. (1978). Attitudinal qualities relating to the strength of the attitude-behavior relation. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 14, 398-408.
15.
Festinger, L. (1957). A theory of cognitive dissonance. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press.
16.
Haddock, G. , Rothman, A. J., & Schwarz, N. (1996). Are (some) reports of attitude strength context dependent?Canadian Journal of Behavioural Science, 28, 313-316.
17.
Hodges, S. D. , & Wilson, T. D. (1993). Effects of analyzing reasons on attitude change: The moderating role of attitude accessibility. Social Cognition, 11, 353-366.
18.
Howard-Pitney, B. , Borgida, E., & Omoto, A. M. (1986). Personal involvement: An examination of processing differences. Social Cognition, 4, 39-57.
19.
Johnson, B. T. , & Eagly, A. H. (1989). Effects of involvement on persuasion: A meta-analysis. Psychological Bulletin, 106, 290-314.
20.
Kiesler, C. A. (1971). The psychology of commitment: Experiments linking behavior to belief. San Diego, CA: Academic Press.
21.
Krosnick, J. A. (1988). Attitude importance and attitude change. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 24, 240-255.
22.
Krosnick, J. A. , & Abelson, R. P. (1992). The case for measuring attitude strength in surveys. In J. Tanur (Ed.), Questions about questions: Inquiries into the cognitive bases of surveys (pp. 177-203). New York: Russell Sage.
23.
Krosnick, J. A. , Boninger, D. S., Chuang, Y. C., Berent, M. K., & Carnot, C. G. (1993). Attitude strength: One construct or many related constructs?Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 65, 1132-1151.
24.
Krosnick, J. A. , & Petty, R. E. (1995). Attitude strength: An overview. In R. E. Petty & J. A. Krosnick (Eds.), Attitude strength: Antecedents and consequences (pp. 1-24). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
25.
Krosnick, J. A. , & Schuman, H. (1988). Attitude intensity, importance, and certainty and susceptibility to response effects. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 54, 940-952.
26.
Leippe, M. R. , & Elkin, R. A. (1987). When motives clash: Issue involvement and response involvement as determinants of persuasion. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 52, 269-278.
27.
Petty, R. E. , & Cacioppo, R. E. (1986). The elaboration likelihood model of persuasion. In L. Berkowitz (Ed.), Advances in experimental social psychology (Vol. 19, pp. 123-205). San Diego, CA: Academic Press.
28.
Petty, R. E. , & Krosnick, J. A. (Eds.). (1995). Attitude strength: Antecedents and consequences. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
29.
Raden, D. (1985). Strength-related attitude dimensions. Social Psychology Quarterly, 48, 312-330.
30.
Roese, N. J. , & Olson, J. M. (1994). Attitude importance as a function of repeated attitude exposure. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 30, 39-51.
31.
Rothman, A. J. , & Hardin, C. D. (1997). Differential use of the availability heuristic in social judgment. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 23, 123-138.
32.
Rothman, A. J. , & Schwarz, N. (1998). Constructing perceptions of vulnerability: Personal relevance and the use of experiential information in health judgments. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 24, 1053-1064.
33.
Schuman, H. , & Presser, S. (1981). Questions and answers in attitude surveys: Experiments on question form, wording, and context. San Diego, CA: Academic Press.
34.
Schwarz, N. (1998). Accessible content and accessibility experiences: The interplay of declarative and experiential information in judgment. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 2, 87-99
35.
Schwarz, N. , Bless, H., Strack, F., Klumpp, G., Rittenauer-Schatka, H., & Simons, A. (1991). Ease of retrieval as information: Another look at the availability heuristic. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 61, 195-202.
36.
Swann, W. B. , Pelham, B. W., & Chidester, T. R. (1988). Change through paradox: Using self-verification to alter beliefs. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 54, 268-273.
37.
Thomsen, C. J. , Borgida, E., & Lavine, H. (1995). The causes and consequences of personal involvement. In R. E. Petty & J. A. Krosnick (Eds.), Attitude strength: Antecedents and consequences (pp. 191-214). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
38.
Tversky, A. , & Kahneman, D. (1973). Availability: A heuristic for judging frequency and probability. Cognitive Psychology, 5, 207-232.
39.
Wänke, M. , Bless, H., & Biller, B. (1996). Subjective experience versus content of information in the construction of attitude judgments. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 22, 1105-1113.
40.
Wilson, T. D. , & Hodges, S. D. (1992). Attitudes as constructions. In L. L. Martin & A. Tesser (Eds.), The construction of social judgment (pp. 37-65). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
41.
Wilson, T. D. , Kraft, D., & Dunn, D. S. (1989). The disruptive effects of explaining attitudes: The moderating effects of knowledge about the attitude object. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 25, 379-400.
