“What a wild thing to think!”: The effects of attitude expression on perceptions of attitude extremity
Despite the existence of a prolific field of research concerned with attitudes and their various properties, there is a glaring lack of understanding of what it means for attitudes to be extreme conceptually. The typical definition simply refers to an attitude’s distance from a scale midpoint (also known as polarization) but makes no indication towards lay definitions or a conceptual understanding. The metrics that one uses to gauge the extremity of an attitude of their own or another’s have not been formally investigated to my knowledge. The current research tested three different conceptualizations of attitude extremity: intensity of feeling, attitude qualifiedness, and the lengths an individual is willing to go to defend their position as indicators for extreme attitudes. Using an experimental design, this study manipulated presence of these qualities (high vs. low vs. control) in counter-attitudinal statements to test for their effects on perceptions of attitude extremity. In addition, individual differences in need to evaluate (the tendency to make more evaluative judgments of situations and stimuli) and need for affect (the tendency to approach or avoid emotional situations and stimuli) were measured in search of general tendencies towards higher or lower extremity judgments, as well as higher or lower willingness to engage in conversation and/or debate with hypothetical peers with opposite beliefs. Support was found for all three hypothesized extremity cues influencing perceived extremity in both directions compared to control groups. Willingness to engage showed an opposite pattern to perceived extremity as expected, though differences from control were not always significant. Insufficient evidence was found for the individual differences’ effects on most outcomes, with the exception of need to evaluate predicting willingness to engage. An interesting multicollinearity between manipulation checks for intensity and lengths, as well as implications for the future of attitudes and social cognition research are discussed.
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