Enhancement of Dominant Attitudes in Group Discussion

Two studies were performed in an attempt to generalize the risky-cautiousshift phenomenon to attitudes and to test "information exchange" and "mutual reinforcement" explanations of discussion-produced shifts. Study I confirmed an assumption of the information-exchange hypothesis by extending to the attitude realm the finding that subjects perceive their peers as less in the valued direction than themselves. In Study II, eight of these items were responded to before and after treatment by subjects in discussion, information-exchange, and control conditions. Only discussion-condition groups evidenced significant attitude shifts and polarization effects. Observations of tape recordings of the discussions indicated that a group's initial mean on an item was a significant predictor of the direction of the discussion rhetoric, which in turn was a predictor of group shifts. However, group initial mean did not directly predict group shifts.