Opinions

Opinion Formation and Change

Opinions can be formed and changed through a number of routes including direct experience, parental influence, group determinants, elite discourse, and information from the mass media or other sources. Direct experiences strongly influence opinions and opinions based on direct experiences may be stronger than those formed via other mechanisms. Salient incidents, especially traumatic ones, can lead to indelible views on a subject, such as when a child is bitten by a dog and subsequently dislikes dogs throughout life, or when a person undergoes a religious conversion that leads to radical changes in his or her perspective on an array of topics. Researchers also find that repeated exposure to a stimulus object is sufficient to enhance a person's opinion of the object. This theory underlies strategies used in advertising and marketing and can be seen at work, for example, in political campaigns in which greater candidate name recognition increases the probability that a candidate will win the election.

Although a person's opinions depend much on his or her personal experience, the source of many of these experiences is through parental teaching and modeling of parents' behavior. Gender role and racial opinions are two prominent areas where parental influence is often observed. Researchers have found that children's opinions toward gender are strongly influenced by their parents. Mothers who worked outside the home, for example, tend to have daughters who hold less traditional views toward work roles than those raised by mothers who were housewives. Researchers have also found that by the age of 4, many children tend to hold opinions that reflect cultural stereotypes about race, and that children tend to adopt their parents' racial prejudices. Parental influence on opinion formation has also been found to be significant in the development of political attitudes or political socialization, although as a child ages this influence wanes.

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