ATTITUDESNumerous books and hundreds of articles
about dissonance theory have been published since
it was introduced by Festinger in 1957. There is a
substantial body of research evidence that sup-
ports various predictions from and elaborations of
the theory. Taken together, this literature has
produced a detailed taxonomy of situations that
produce dissonance and of preferred modes of
dissonance reduction in various types of situations.
ATTITUDE STABILITY AND ATTITUDE
CHANGEBoth balance and dissonance theories identify the
desire for consistency as a major source of stability
and change in attitudes. The desire to maintain
consistency leads the individual either to interpret
new information as congruent with his or her
existing cognitions (assimilation) or to reject it if it
would challenge existing attitudes (contrast). This
process is very important in preserving stability in
one’s attitudes. At the same time, the desire for
consistency will lead to attitude change when im-
balance or dissonance occurs. Dissonance theo-
ry explicitly considers the link between behav-
ior and attitudes. It predicts that engaging in
counterattitudinal behavior may indirectly affect
attitudes. This is one mechanism by which social
influences on behavior may indirectly affect atti-
tudes. This mechanism comes into play when the
person experiences changes in roles and the re-
quirements of the new role are inconsistent with
his or her prior attitudes.
The classic perspective in the study of attitude
change is the communication–persuasion paradigm,
which grew out of the work by Hovland and his
colleagues at Yale University. Persuasion is defined
as changing the beliefs or attitudes of a person
through the use of information or argument. At-
tempts at persuasion are widespread in everyday
interaction, and the livelihood of advertisers and
political consultants. According to the paradigm,
each attempt involves source, message, target, and
context. Thousands of empirical studies, many of
them experiments done in laboratory settings,
have investigated the influence of variations in
these four components on the outcome of an
attempt. In general, if the source is perceived as an
expert, trustworthy, or physically attractive, the
message is more likely to produce attitude change.
Thus, it is no accident that magazine and television
commercials feature young, attractive models. Mes-
sage variables include the extent of discrepancy
from the target’s attitude, whether it arouses fear,
and whether it presents one or both sides. Under
certain conditions, highly discrepant, fear-arous-
ing, and one-sided messages are more effective.
Target factors include intelligence, self-esteem,
and prior experience and knowledge. The most
researched contextual factor is mood. For a review
of this research, see Perloff (1993).In the 1990s considerable work built upon the
elaboration–likelihood model proposed by Petty and
Cacioppo (1986). This model identifies two basic
routes through which a message may change a
target’s attitudes: the central and the peripheral.
Persuasion via the central route occurs when a
target scrutinizes the arguments contained in the
message, interprets and evaluates them, and inte-
grates them into a coherent position. This process
is termed elaboration. In elaboration, attitude change
occurs when the arguments are strong, internally
coherent, and consistent with known facts. Persua-
sion via the peripheral route occurs when, instead of
elaborating the message, the target pays attention
primarily to extraneous cues linked to the mes-
sage. Among these cues are characteristics of the
source (expertise, trustworthiness, attractiveness),
superficial characteristics of the message such as
length, or characteristics of the context such as
response of other audience members. Several fac-
tors influence whether elaboration occurs. One is
the target’s involvement with the issue; if the target
is highly involved with and cares about the issue
addressed by the message, he or she is more likely
to elaborate the message. Other factors include
whether the target is distracted by noise or some
other aspect of the situation, and whether the
target is tired. Which route a message elicits in
attitude change is important. Attitudes established
by the central route tend to be more strongly held
and more resistant to change because the target
has thought through the issue in more detail.The literature on attitude change flourished
in the 1990s. The effects of many variables have
been studied experimentally. A review of the re-
search conducted in 1992 to 1995 concluded that
any one variable may have multiple effects, de-
pending upon other aspects of the persuasion
attempt (Petty, Wegener, and Fabrigar 1997). For