Relationships among the latitudes of acceptance, rejection, and noncommitment were investigated to develop indicators of ego involvement, using the owncategories method and the method of ordered alternatives. Degree of involvement was differentiated across attitude positions (extreme-moderate) and among persons taking the same position. Findings from five studies were that degree of involvement is (a) inversely related to fineness of discrimination in judging beliefs about one's reference group; ( 6) associated with the priority of normative concerns (values) in one's reference group; (c) positively related to selectivity in attributing credibility to communicators and to contrast effects in judging communicator positions; (d) inversely related to attitude change in response to short communications; and (e) positively related to the probability of action and positive response to social pressures to action congruent with attitude. Factors affecting the indicators and possible implications for attitude research arc discussed.Theories about attitude functioning and change frequently make predictions that are contingent upon the degree of intensity, personal meaning, importance, or ego involvement of the attitude object to the person (cf.

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In a 2 x 3 design, 69 men and 59 women who were high, medium, or low in authoritarianism responded to a Likert-type scale measuring attitudes toward feminism. For both gender groups, high-authoritarian respondents exhibited more antifeminist tendencies than did low-authoritarian respondents; and for each level of authoritarianism, males were less profeminist than females. When controlled for age, education, and religion, the relationship of gender and authoritarianism to attitudes toward feminism tended to persist substantially. In examining the psychosocial bases of racism and antifeminism, the paper interprets the relative contributions of gender and authoritarianism in terms of Hood and Sherif's model of interrelating sociocultural and personality factors in the dynamics of attitudes.

Based on their different conceptualizations of the processes evoked by role playing and issue importance in the induction of attitude change, cognitive dissonance, incentive, and social judgment theories make competing predictions on the relative effectiveness of role playing and passive exposure as a junction of issue importance. The experiment utilized a 3 × 2 design having control, passive-exposure, and role-playing conditions with low and high levels of issue importance. Planned comparisons of means in the cells expected to register maximal and minimal changes in attitudes under each theory provided little support for the dissonance position and fairly credible, though somewhat overlapping, evidence for incentive and social judgment theories. Other comparisons indicated that improvised role playing produced more change than did passive exposure only for the high- importance issue.

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