A Study of Certain Factors Involved in Changes of Opinion

Ewing, Thomas N.

doi:10.1080/00224545.1942.9714105

Cited by 60 publications

(35 citation statements)

References 19 publications

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“…This strong effect runs counter to a general consensus in the literature that extreme attitudes are less susceptible to persuasion attempts (Ewing, 1942;Osgood & Tannenbaum, 1955: Sarat & Vidmar, 1976Tannenbaum, 1956). According to Robert Abelson (1995), "Psychologically, all types of overt challenge (to one's extreme attitude) tend to dichotomize the opinions of the target, encouraging resistance, lest weakness be signaled" (p. 29).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 89%

Changing Attitudes Through Social Influence: Does Social Distance Matter?

Mahaffey

Bryan

2015

Journal of Homosexuality

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To test the effects of social influence and social distance on attitudes, we assessed judgments of gay and lesbian targets in various contexts over three studies (n = 814, 51% female). We compared the impact of a derogatory message to a relatively favorable message ostensibly written by another participant. Participants were robustly moved by the feedback; social influence was a significant predictor in final evaluations of the target, as was social distance. Discrimination against gay men and lesbian women appears not to be a fixed behavior; seemingly anyone can be persuaded to discriminate or not to discriminate by mere peer suggestion.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 89%

Changing Attitudes Through Social Influence: Does Social Distance Matter?

Mahaffey

Bryan

2015

Journal of Homosexuality

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“…[15][16][17][18] When individuals strongly believe themselves to be correct, they are more likely to positively evaluate information that supports that belief and negatively evaluate incongruent information; their attitudes are likely to polarize. [19,20] This study explores what incoming undergraduates know about statistics; therefore, the strength of these students' self-confidence was important in future attempts to remediate incorrect procedural fluency or conceptual understandings.…”

Section: The Importance Of (Incorrect) Self-confidencementioning

confidence: 99%

The incoming statistical knowledge of undergraduate majors in a department of mathematics and statistics

Cook

Fukawa-Connelly

2015

International Journal of Mathematical Education in Science and

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Studies have shown that at the end of an introductory statistics course, students struggle with building block concepts, such as mean and standard deviation, and rely on procedural understandings of the concepts. This study aims to investigate the understandings entering freshman of a department of mathematics and statistics (including mathematics education), students who are presumably better prepared in terms of mathematics and statistics than the average university student, have of introductory statistics. This case study found that these students enter college with common statistical misunderstandings, lack of knowledge, and idiosyncratic collections of correct statistical knowledge. Moreover, they also have a wide range of beliefs about their knowledge with some of the students who believe that they have the strongest knowledge also having significant misconceptions. More attention to these statistical building blocks may be required in a university introduction statistics course.

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“…It is commonly operationalized as a deviation from a neutral point on an evaluative scale whose end points are marked as (extremely) favourable and (extremely) unfavourable. Extremity has been demonstrated to relate to resistance to change (Ewing, 1942;Osgood & Tannenbaum, 1955), overt behaviour (Fazio & Zanna, 1978a,b), and other cognitions such as attributions of opinion similarity (Allison & Messick, 1988;Van der Pligt, Ester, & Van der Lindern, 1983). Historically, this attitudinal characteristic was recognized early on as a distinctive attitudinal dimension (Allport & Hartman, 1925;Johnson, 1940;Suchman, 1950).…”

Section: Evaluative Extremitymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…It is usually measured by asking people how personally important their attitudes are, how concerned they are about them, and how important an attitude is in comparison to others. Importance has been demonstrated to contribute to greater temporal stability of attitudes (Krosnick, 1988a), stronger attitude-behaviour relationship (Jaccard & Becker, 1985;Nederhof, 1989;Schuman & Presser, 1981); greater resistance to change (Borgida & Howard-Pitney, 1983;Ewing, 1942;Fine, 1957;Rhine & Severance, 1970), and attitudinal effects to other cognitions such as perceptions of others (Clore & Baldridge, 1968) and perception of differences between political candidates (Krosnick, 1988b). Importance is positively related to attitude certainty (Nederhof, 1989;Raden, 1985), knowledge (Judd & Lusk, 1984), extremity (Krosnick, 1988b;Sidanius, 1988), amount of experience with the attitude object (Nederhof, 1989); and to accessibility (Krosnick, 1989, Tourangeau, Rasinski, & D'Andrade, 1991Roese & Olson, 1994).…”

Section: Importancementioning

confidence: 99%