Attitudes as Temporary Constructions

For the past several years we have investigated the effects of introspection on attitude change. We have found that when people are asked to think about why they feel the way they do about something, they often change their minds about how they feel. People who analyze their reasons have been found to change their attitudes toward such diverse things as political candidates (Wilson, Kraft, We have been struck by how easy it has been to get people to change their attitudes, in marked contrast to how unyielding people are in other kinds of social psychological studies. Our findings seem inconsistent with the vast literature on attitude change, which has found that you have to go to some length to change people's views. Consider research on persuasive communications. Only after listening to carefully crafted speeches that contain powerful arguments , or are delivered by attractive, expert sources, or both, do subjects change their attitudes (Eagly & Chaiken, 1984; Petty & Cacioppo, 1986). In our studies all we ask people to do is to think, privately and anonynlously , about why they feel the way they do-and they change their minds about how they feel. The ease with which people adopt new attitudes has caused us, along with some other recent theorists, to question the view that people hold stable attitudes. In this chapter we review evidence contrary to this tradition;^! viewpoint. 38 WILSON AND HODGES To preview, we suggest that people often have a large, conflicting "data base" relevant to their attitudes on any given topic, and the attitude they have at any given time depends on the subset of these data to which they attend. We review evidence showing that the data people use are influenced by both contextual factors and the kind of thought in which they engage. Finally, we argue that the attitude change resulting from these contextual and thought processes is sometimes detrimental, leading to nonoptimal preferences and decisions. Our characterization of attitudes as temporarily constructed judgments is quite consistent with the overall theme of this book concerning the construction of social judgment. It has become clear that many different kinds of judgments and impressions are influenced by the context in which they are formed. Most models of social construction, however, are concerned with situations in which people judge stimuli that are ambiguous or about which they know little (such as the priming literature, in which …