Attitude Importance: Understanding the Causes and Consequences of Passionately Held Views

People care passionately about some attitudes and consider them deeply important, and they accord no particular significance to other attitudes. In the current paper, we review the state of the psychological literature on attitude importance. We consider the factors that cause people to attach importance to some attitudes but not to others, and we review the cognitive, affective, and behavioral consequences of attaching importance to an attitude. Finally, we explore several open questions regarding attitude importance, charting a course for future research in this area. Attitudes, or people’s overall evaluations of the objects in their environment, have garnered a tremendous amount of scholarly attention across the social sciences. The fields of sociology, political science, economics, anthropology, and social and political philosophy are just some of the many disciplines that have taken an interest in human likes and dislikes. For social psychologists, however, the attitude construct has held an especially privileged and central status. In fact, attitudes have famously been referred to as ‘the most distinctive and indispensable concept’ in the field of social psychology (Allport, 1935). One of the reasons that attitudes are practically and theoretically important to social psychologists is because they have predictable and very powerful effects on behavior (see Greenwald, 1989). However, determining which attitudes most accurately predict which behaviors under what circumstances has turned out be a highly complex enterprise, stimulating social psychological research for more than half a century. This research has revealed that some kinds of individuals are more likely than others to act on their attitudes (e.g. Rholes & Bailey, 1983; Zanna, Olson, & Fazio, 1980). In addition, some kinds of situations are more likely than others to promote attitude-congruent behaviors (e.g. Carver, 1975; Jamieson & Zanna, 1989). In addition to differences across people and across situations, there are also marked differences across types of attitudes – some kinds of attitudes are more likely than others to motivate and guide behavior. The term ‘attitude strength’ has been used to capture this distinction. Specifically, strong attitudes are those that resist change in the face of attack, persist 1720 Attitude Importance © 2008 The Authors Social and Personality Psychology Compass 2/4 (2008): 1719–1736, 10.1111/j.1751-9004.2008.00125.x Journal Compilation © 2008 Blackwell Publishing Ltd over long spans of time, and exert a pronounced impact on thought and behavior, whereas weak attitudes exhibit none of these characteristics (Krosnick & Petty, 1995). Thus, predicting an individual’s behavior with respect to a given object requires not only knowing his or her attitude toward the object, but knowing the strength of that attitude as well. If the attitude is strong, it will be highly predictive of the individual’s behavior, but if the attitude is weak, it will provide little leverage for predicting behavior. Not surprisingly, a high priority for attitude scholars has been identifying the markers of strong versus weak attitudes. Such investigations have uncovered about a dozen features of an attitude that contribute to its strength. These features include, for example, the certainty with which the attitude is held, the volume of attitude-relevant knowledge on which the attitude is based, the degree of personal importance that is attached to the attitude, the degree to which the attitude is ambivalent, and others (for a review, see Petty & Krosnick, 1995). Each of these features has been shown to differentiate strong attitudes from weak attitudes in independent lines of research. For example, increases in certainty and knowledge and importance are all associated with greater attitude strength, and increases in ambivalence are associated with decreasing strength. These dozen or so strength-related attitude features can be said to fall into one of four basic categories (Krosnick & Petty, 1995). The first category includes features that are aspects of the attitude itself, such as the degree of favorability or negativity of the attitude (i.e. attitude extremity). The second category includes features of the cognitive structure associated with the attitude in memory, such as the amount of knowledge linked to the attitude object in memory, and the strength of the association between the attitude and attitude object (i.e. attitude accessibility). In the third category are the cognitive processes by which an attitude is formed, such as the degree of thinking that one has done about an attitude object’s merits and shortcomings (i.e. attitude elaboration). Finally, the last category includes subjective beliefs about the attitude and the attitude object, such as how certain one is about his or her attitude towards an object. Attitude importance, the focus of the current paper, falls into this last category. Defining Attitude Importance What attitude importance is Attitude importance is a subjective judgment about or perception of one’s attitude towards an object (Boninger, Krosnick, Berent, & Fabrigar, 1995b; Krosnick, 1988b). Specifically, it is the extent to which a person is concerned with and cares about a particular attitude that he or she holds (Krosnick, 1989; Krosnick, 1990; Krosnick, Boninger, Chuang, Berent, & Carnot, 1993). For example, a woman who is deeply concerned about the issue of legalized abortion and who experiences her attitude on this