Determinants of Lateral Attitude Change: The Roles of Object Relatedness, Attitude Certainty, and Moral Conviction

Attitudes refer to general evaluations people have regarding people, places, objects, and issues. Attitudes serve a number of important functions such as guiding choices and actions and giving people a sense of identity and belonging. Attitudes can differ in the extent to which they come from affect, cognition, and behavior. These bases of attitudes can be appraised objectively and subjectively. Attitudes can also differ in their strength, with some attitudes being more impactful and predictive of behavior than others. Some indicators of attitude strength have been viewed as relatively objective in nature (e.g., stability, resistance, accessibility, spreading) whereas other strength indicators are more subjective in nature (e.g., attitude certainty, subjective ambivalence, perceived moral basis of attitudes). Attitudes can be stored in memory in different ways, including an attitude structure in which attitude objects are linked to both positivity and negatively separately, tagging these evaluations with varying degrees of validity. Finally, after a long tradition of assessing attitudes using people’s responses to self-report measures (explicit measures of attitudes), more recent work has also assessed attitude change with measures that tap into people’s more automatic evaluations (implicit measures of attitudes). Implicit and explicit measures can be useful in predicting behavior separately and also in combination.

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The Influence of Public Commitment on the Attitude Change Process: The Effects of Attitude Certainty, PFC and SNI

SSRN Electronic Journal ◽

10.2139/ssrn.1010562 ◽

2007 ◽

Author(s):

Mahesh Gopinath ◽

Prashanth U. Nyer

Keyword(s):

Attitude Change ◽

Change Process ◽

Attitude Certainty ◽

Public Commitment

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Emotion Decoding and Incidental Processing Fluency as Antecedents of Attitude Certainty

Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin ◽

10.1177/0146167217700606 ◽

2017 ◽

Vol 43 (7) ◽

pp. 924-939

Author(s):

John V. Petrocelli ◽

Melanie B. Whitmire

Keyword(s):

Facial Expressions ◽

Attitude Change ◽

Attitude Formation ◽

Gaze Direction ◽

Processing Fluency ◽

The Gaze ◽

Attitude Certainty ◽

Emotion Decoding ◽

The Social ◽

Resistance To Persuasion

Previous research demonstrates that attitude certainty influences the degree to which an attitude changes in response to persuasive appeals. In the current research, decoding emotions from facial expressions and incidental processing fluency, during attitude formation, are examined as antecedents of both attitude certainty and attitude change. In Experiment 1, participants who decoded anger or happiness during attitude formation expressed their greater attitude certainty, and showed more resistance to persuasion than participants who decoded sadness. By manipulating the emotion decoded, the diagnosticity of processing fluency experienced during emotion decoding, and the gaze direction of the social targets, Experiment 2 suggests that the link between emotion decoding and attitude certainty results from incidental processing fluency. Experiment 3 demonstrated that fluency in processing irrelevant stimuli influences attitude certainty, which in turn influences resistance to persuasion. Implications for appraisal-based accounts of attitude formation and attitude change are discussed.

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Action, Judgment, and Imagination in Hannah Arendt’s Thought

Political Research Quarterly ◽

10.1177/1065912917702500 ◽

2017 ◽

Vol 70 (3) ◽

pp. 523-534 ◽

Cited By ~ 4

Author(s):

Andrew H. Tyner

Keyword(s):

Political Participation ◽

New World ◽

Political Actors ◽

Moral Conviction ◽

Contemporary Research ◽

Attitude Certainty ◽

The World ◽

First Offers

This article presents a conception of imagination that emerges from Hannah Arendt’s writings on action, judgment, and responsibility. Imagination, for Arendt, is central to the processes of action and judgment, as it enables political actors and spectators to imagine a new world that could look differently from the world that exists. Importantly, though, this imagined world needs to bear some resemblance to the world that actually exists to avoid losing touch with reality and factual truth. The loss of reality and factual truth risks judgments that are inattentive and actions that are destructive and tyrannical. Imagination must be bounded, for Arendt, to ensure that action and judgment remain tied to reality. The article first offers this novel interpretation of Arendtian imagination before discussing its relationship to contemporary research on political participation, moral conviction, and attitude certainty.

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Self-censorship, the Spiral of Silence, and Contemporary Political Communication

10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199793471.013.31 ◽

2014 ◽

Cited By ~ 2

Author(s):

Andrew F. Hayes ◽

Jörg Matthes

Keyword(s):

Political Communication ◽

Group Dynamics ◽

Information Seeking ◽

Ad Hoc ◽

Spiral Of Silence ◽

Moral Conviction ◽

Attitude Certainty ◽

Opinion Expression ◽

The Media

This chapter introduces the tenets of spiral of silence theory as a theory of group dynamics as it relates to the interplay among the media, interpersonal talk, and political discussion. After reviewing some of the findings related to its key propositions, its applicability to modern political communication and mass media research is questioned and fine-tuned. An argument is made that future researchers should abandoned the quest for evidence whether public opinion expression is guided by perceptions of the opinion climate, especially using ad hoc measures that have not been validated. Rather attention should be directed toward examining the role of social pressures in motivating information seeking about the opinion climate and how individual differences such as fear of isolation, attitude certainty, and moral conviction can influence the effect of those perceptions on publicly-observable political behavior.

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