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A linear integration model for attitude change was tested in an experiment on judgments of United States Presidents. The subjects received paragraphs describing the actions and achievements of various United States Presidents and rated them on statesmanship. The data generally supported the parallelism prediction of the model, although one significant discrepancy was found. Order of presentation yielded a small nonsignificant primacy effect.

A collection of 220 paragraphs of graded value about U.S. presidents is given. The collection includes 16 paragraphs about each of nine presidents and 8 paragraphs about each of eight presidents. For each president, the paragraphs have one of four rough values for judgments of statesmanship, H, M+, M-, and L. These paragraphs have proved useful in experimental applications of integration theory to attitude change. Other advantages of U.S. history as a source of issues and material for research on attitudes are also pointed out. This report makes available a collection of paragraphs about U.S. presidents that we have found useful in applications of integration theory to attitude change (Anderson, 1971). Each paragraph contains information about some president, usually on his performance in office though sometimes on other actions and accomplishments. In the experiments, the S reads a set of paragraphs about some president and then judges him on statemanship and how well he did his job. Three experiments have used these paragraphs in successful tests of information integration theory (Anderson, 1972; Anderson & Farkas, 1972; Sawyers & Anderson, 1971). Good support has been found for the parallelism prediction in all three experiments. The second cited study has particular interest since it obtained the first serial position curve in attitude research. That was possible only because of this collection of stimulus materials. The main body of the collection contains 16 paragraphs about each of nine presidents and 8 paragraphs about each of eight presidents. In each case, there are equally many paragraphs at each of four levels of favorableness: very favorable, H, mildly favorable, M+; mildly unfavorable, M-; and very unfavorable, L. There are also paragraphs about three presidents that serve as end-anchors, and a short history summary.