Distinguishing the cognitive and behavioral consequences of attitude importance and certainty: A new approach to testing the common-factor hypothesis

Some published factor analyses have suggested that attitude importance and certainty are distinct psychological constructs, but other factor analytic investigations have suggested they are largely redundant reflections of a more general underlying construct. This latter sort of finding has led investigators to average measures of importance and certainty together into a composite index and then explore its cognitive and behavioral consequences. In this paper, we report three studies gauging the underlying structure of these strength-related attitude attributes by assessing whether they in fact relate in the same ways to information processing and action tendencies. We found that importance and certainty both independently predicted the likelihood that a person attempted to persuade others to adopt his or her attitude. Importance (but not certainty) was associated with the tendency to seek out information that would enable people to use their attitudes in a subsequent judgment and only importance predicted whether or not they turned out to vote in an election to express their attitudes. Certainty (but not importance) was related to the tendency to find more than one political candidate acceptable. And importance and certainty interacted to predict the frequency with which people performed attitude-expressive behaviors. All this suggests that importance and certainty have distinct effects on thinking and behavior and supports the maintenance of conceptual and empirical distinctions between them in social psychological theory building. 2002 Elsevier Science (USA). All rights reserved. Some attitudes are durable and impactful—they resist change in the face of a persuasive appeal, they remain stable over time, and they exert a powerful influence on thinking and behavior—whereas others are not. The term ‘‘attitude strength’’ is often used to capture this distinction, and researchers have identified roughly a dozen attributes of attitudes that are associated with their strength (see Petty & Krosnick, 1995). Among these strength-related attitude attributes are certainty (e.g., Budd, 1986), importance (e.g., Krosnick, 1988a), accessibility (e.g., Fazio, 1986), ambivalence (e.g., Kaplan, 1972), extremity (e.g., Osgood, Suci, & Tannenbaum, 1957), elaboration (e.g., Petty & Cacioppo, 1986), knowledge (e.g., Wood, 1982), intensity (e.g. Cantril, 1946), evaluative-cognitive consistency (e.g., Chaiken & Baldwin, 1981), and evaluative-affective consistency (e.g., Chaiken & Pomerantz, 1992). In separate lines of research, each of these attributes has been shown to relate to the durability and impactfulness of attitudes (see Petty & Krosnick, 1995, for a review). A large literature now exists documenting the relations of such attitude attributes with the four defining features of strong attitudes (i.e., stability over time, resistance to persuasion, and powerful impact on thought and on behavior). Considerably less is known, however, Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 39 (2003) 118–141 www.elsevier.com/locate/jesp Journal of Experimental Social Psychology The study of public opinion on global warming was supported by grants from the National Science Foundation (Grant SBR-9731532), the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the US Environmental Protection Agency, and the Ohio State University and was sponsored by Resources for the Future. This research was completed partly while the Jon Krosnick was a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (supported by NSF Grant SBR-9022192). Jon Krosnick is University Fellow at Resources for the Future. * Corresponding author. Present address: Department of Psychology, University of Chicago, 5848 S. University Avenue, Chicago, IL