Five studies examined the relations between attitude importance and 3 of its hypothesized determinants: self-interest, social identification with reference groups or reference individuals, and cherished values. Verbal protocols, multivariate analysis of survey data, and laboratory experimentation revealed that (1) people's theories of the causes of attitude importance pointed to all 3 hypothesized predictors, (2) the 3 predictors each had significant, unique statistical associations with importance, and (3) a manipulation of self-interest yielded a corresponding change in importance. These results help clarify the nature and origins of attitude importance, challenge the widely believed claim that self-interest has little or no impact on political cognition, and identify new likely consequences of social identification processes and values.

People who attach personal importance to an attitude are especially knowledgeable about the attitude object. This article tests an explanation for this relation: that importance causes the accumulation of knowledge by inspiring selective exposure to and selective elaboration of relevant information. Nine studies showed that (a) after watching televised debates between presidential candidates, viewers were better able to remember the statements made on policy issues on which they had more personally important attitudes; (b) importance motivated selective exposure and selective elaboration: Greater personal importance was associated with better memory for relevant information encountered under controlled laboratory conditions, and manipulations eliminating opportunities for selective exposure and selective elaboration eliminated the importance-memory accuracy relation; and (c) people do not use perceptions of their knowledge volume to infer how important an attitude is to them, but importance does cause knowledge accumulation.

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Failures to replicate evidence of new discoveries have forced scientists to ask whether this unreliability is due to suboptimal implementation of optimal methods or whether presumptively optimal methods are not, in fact, optimal. This paper reports an investigation by four coordinated laboratories of the prospective replicability of 16 novel experimental findings using current optimal practices: high statistical power, preregistration, and complete methodological transparency. In contrast to past systematic replication efforts that reported replication rates averaging 50%, replication attempts here produced the expected effects with significance testing (p<.05) in 86% of attempts, slightly exceeding maximum expected replicability based on observed effect size and sample size. When one lab attempted to replicate an effect discovered by another lab, the effect size in the replications was 97% that of the original study. This high replication rate justifies confidence in rigor enhancing methods and suggests that past failures to replicate may be attributable to departures from optimal procedures.