Issue-Importance and Forced-Compliance Attitude Change

Abstract

An experiment was performed to determine the relationship between the importance of attitudes and the extent to which they are changed by the forced compliance procedure. Subjects freely consented to write a counterattitudinal essay concerning one of several political issues. The importance of the issue assigned to subjects was systematically varied across six conditions. As predicted by McGuire's information-processing theory (1968a, 1968b), importance affected attitude change in a quadratic manner, the greatest change occurring in the conditions of moderate importance. Further analysis suggests that this inverted-U effect was not due to variations in initial attitude extremity or essay quality. Linear and nonlinear relationships were discussed.

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References

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