Attitude Strength

Definition

Some attitudes exert a powerful impact on thinking and on behavior, whereas others are largely inconsequential. Similarly, some attitudes are very firm, resistant to even the strongest challenges and persistent over long spans of time, but others are highly malleable, yielding to the slightest provocation and fluctuation over time. The term attitude strength is used to capture this distinction. Specifically, strong attitudes are those that (a) resist change, (b) persist over time, (c) guide information processing, and (d) motivate and direct behavior.

Background

A great deal of evidence attests to the impact of attitudes on a wide array of outcomes. There is evidence, for example, that attitudes can color one's interpretation of ambiguous stimuli, causing one to perceive the stimuli in attitude-congruent ways. This explains why supporters of two competing political candidates can watch the same political debate and come away equally convinced that their own preferred candidate prevailed. In addition, attitudes can shape people's perceptions of other people's attitudes, causing them to overestimate the prevalence of their views. There is also a wealth of evidence that attitudes motivate and guide behavior. For example, people's attitudes toward recycling are strongly predictive of whether they actually participate in recycling programs, and attitudes toward political candidates are excellent predictors of voting behavior. In these and countless other ways, thoughts and actions are profoundly shaped by attitudes.

Attitudes do not always exert such powerful effects, however. In fact, in addition to the impressive findings about the power of attitudes, the attitude literature is also full of an equally impressive set of failures to find any effect of attitudes on thought or behavior. In fact, by the late 1960s, the literature was so inconsistent that some prominent scholars questioned the very existence of attitudes, sending the field into a period of crisis.

Since then, social psychologists have made great progress toward identifying the conditions under which attitudes influence thoughts and behavior. It is now clear, for example, that attitudes are consequential for some types of people more than others, and in some situations more than others. More recently, social psychologists have also come to recognize that some attitudes are inherently more powerful than others. That is, across people and situations, some attitudes exert a strong impact on thinking and on behavior, whereas others have little or no impact.

Determinants of Attitude Strength

What makes an attitude strong? Over the past few decades, researchers have identified roughly a dozen distinct features of attitudes that are associated with their strength. These include knowledge, the amount of information people have stored in memory about the attitude object; importance, the degree to which people care about and attach psychological significance to an attitude object; certainty, the degree to which people are sure that their attitudes are valid and correct; elaboration, the amount of thought that has been devoted to the attitude object; extremity, how far from the midpoint the attitude is on a negative–positive continuum; accessibility, how quickly and easily the attitude comes to mind when the attitude object is encountered; ambivalence, the degree to which people simultaneously experience both positive and negative reactions to an attitude object; and a handful of other features. In separate programs of research, each of these attitude [Page 70]features has been shown to relate to one or more of the four defining properties of strong attitudes.

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