David S. Boninger

Attitude strength: One construct or many related constructs?

A variety of attributes differentiate attitudes that are stable and conseguential from those that are not, including extremity, certainty, importance, knowledge, intensity, interest, direct experience, accessibility, latitudes of rejection and noncommitment, and affective-cognitive consistency. Although these dimensions are clearly conceptually and operationally distinct from one another, researchers have often assumed that some are interchangeable, or that two or more reflect common higher-order constructs. Three studies using multitrait-multimethod confirmatory factor analysis assessed the relations among these dimensions. Although some of these dimensions are strongly related, most are not, and a multifactor model seems necessary to account for their intercorrelations

Origins of attitude importance, self-interest, social identification, and value relevance

Five studies examined the relations between attitude importance and 3 of its hypothesized determinants: self-interest, social identification with reference groups or reference individuals, and cherished values. Verbal protocols, multivariate analysis of survey data, and laboratory experimentation revealed that (1) peoples theories of the causes of attitude importance pointed to all 3 hypothesized predictors, (2) the 3 predictors each had significant, unique statistical associations with importance, and (3) a manipulation of self-interest yielded a corresponding change in importance. These results help clarify the nature and origins of attitude importance, challenge the widely believed claim that self-interest has little or no impact on political cognition, and identify new likely consequences of social identification processes and values.

All Cues Are Not Created Equal: Obtaining Attitude Persistence under Low-Involvement Conditions

Attitude persistence research in consumer behavior has been predominantly associated with high- rather than low-involvement processing. Advertising, however, is most often processed as a low-involvement communication. The authors predict that different low-involvement cues lead to different degrees of attitude persistence. Consistent with this prediction, they find that under low-involvement conditions, when both related and unrelated peripheral cues evoke similar initial attitudes, only when the cue is related to the product category do attitudes persist over time. The results of two studies attest to the robustness of the phenomenon and add to current models of attitude persistence by showing that peripherally processed advertising cues (e.g., brand names and celebrity endorsers) may lead to persistence if they are related to the product being endorsed. Copyright 1997 by the University of Chicago.

Attitude Importance and the Accumulation of Attitude-Relevant Knowledge in Memory.

People who attach personal importance to an attitude are especially knowledgeable about the attitude object. This article tests an explanation for this relation: that importance causes the accumulation of knowledge by inspiring selective exposure to and selective elaboration of relevant information. Nine studies showed that (a) after watching televised debates between presidential candidates, viewers were better able to remember the statements made on policy issues on which they had more personally important attitudes; (b) importance motivated selective exposure and selective elaboration: Greater personal importance was associated with better memory for relevant information encountered under controlled laboratory conditions, and manipulations eliminating opportunities for selective exposure and selective elaboration eliminated the importance-memory accuracy relation; and (c) people do not use perceptions of their knowledge volume to infer how important an attitude is to them, but importance does cause knowledge accumulation.

Discovery of Reliable Attitude Change Persistence Resulting From a Transmitter Tuning Set

Support was found for the hypothesis that recipients of persuasive messages who are set to transmit the contents to others will exhibit attitude change that persists over time. In four studies, 208 students and 300 nonstudent adults were given either a transmitter set or a control set (a set to receive more information or no set instructions) prior to reading a persuasive message. Transmitters consistently exhibited more attitude change persistence at delays ranging from two to five months, across different populations, and for attitude issues evoking varying degrees of initial agreement. The practical implications for public health and education are discussed.

Pockets of responsibility in the American electorate: Findings of a research program on attitude importance

One view of American citizens suggests that attitudes about government policies play little role in shaping peoples political behavior. The article summarizes a program of research suggesting that such a view is incorrect. For each citizen, a few personally important policy attitudes tend to have substantial impact on political thinking and behavior. Attitude importance is defined, and its distribution among citizens is noted. Various effects of attitude importance and the reasons why people come to perceive certain policy attitudes as personally important are then discussed. Finally, implications that the research may have for other political phenomena, such as alienation and the meanings of elections, are identified.

Effects of Transmitter Tuning on Attitude Change Persistence: An Examination of Alternative Explanations

Lassiter, Pezzo, and Apple (this issue) replicated the effect of transmitter tuning on attitude change persistence (Boninger, Brock, Cook, Gruder, & Romer, 1990) and included an additional condition as the basis for an alternative explanation. Although their independent replication is an important contribution that provides significant empirical corroboration, a superficial rendering of the interrupted-task literature (Zeigarnik, 192711938) and ambiguity in the operationalization of the additional condition appear to weaken their proposed interruption-perseveration explanation. We also summarize ancillary data from our earlier work (Boninger et at., 1990) that shed further doubt on this alternative explanation.