Ego involvement and the absolute judgment of attitude statements.

Abstract

Personal involvement in a social issue was manipulated both experimentally and by S selection while controlling for extremity of attitude. The effects on the absolute judgment of relevant attitude statements then was observed. The more highly involved was S, the further from his own position the statements were judged. This effect was not significant for statements on 2 irrelevant attitude scales. The Involvement X Item Position interaction was not significant. These results were interpreted as providing support for the notion of involvementinfluenced judgment of attitude statements. A possible cognitive interpretation of the phenomenon was suggested.

Judgement of Attitude Statements as a Function of Judges' Attitudes and the Judgemental Dimension

“…Although the questionnaire included no direct measure of subjects' involvement, an indirect test of this possibility may be made by inspection of subjects' overall mean ratings on each scale (Table s). While Sherif and his co-workers do not regularly draw a sharp distinction between involvement and extremity of own position, those studies which have attempted to do so (Ward, 1965(Ward, , 1966 imply that greater involvement should lead to a more marked inverse relationship between mean rating and own position, which should mean that the effects of attitude and high v. low polarizers should significantly interact in the analysisof subjects' mean ratings, which they do not, It would thus seem unlikely that the differences between high and low polarizers could be attributed to differential levels of involvement.…”

Turning up the contrast: Self-enhancement motives prompt egocentric contrast effects in social judgments.

“…Subsequent researchers have offered cognitive accounts for why contrast effects should be greater for egoinvolved individuals. For example, Ward (1965) suggested that the attitudes of ego-involved individuals may be more cognitively salient. Similarly, accentuation theorists have suggested that personal involvement might make a peripheral agree-disagree evaluation more salient, thus prompting greater contrast effects (Eiser & van der Pligt, 1984;Judd & Harackiewicz, 1980).…”

Attitudinal maintenance of cognitive categorization

“…Several studies have measured categorization complexity across more than one domain of stimuli for the same Ss (Glixman, 1965;Ward, 1965;Larsen, 1971). In these studies, the Ss were presented with several different domains of sentences, preselected to vary in involvement.…”