Attitude Change
To first have a change in attitude you must judge how close or how far away your position is. The next step is shifting you position in response to the argument made. We adjust our attitude once we have judged it to be in our latitude of acceptance. If we judge that message to be in our latitude of rejection we will also adjust our attitude, but away from what we think the speaker is advocating. Sometimes an attitude change may be incidental. The boomerang effect is an attitude change in the opposite direction of what the message advocates. The listener is driven away from rather than drawn to an idea. A major implication of social judgment theory is that persuasion is difficult to accomplish. Successful persuasive messages are those that are targeted to the receiver’s latitude of acceptance and discrepant from the anchor position, so that the incoming information cannot be assimilated or contrasted. The receiver’s ego-involvement must also be taken into consideration. This suggests that even successful attempts at persuasion will yield small changes in attitude.
Read more about this topic: Social Judgment Theory
Famous quotes containing the words attitude and/or change:
“You cannot go into any field or wood, but it will seem as if every stone had been turned, and the bark on every tree ripped up. But, after all, it is much easier to discover than to see when the cover is off. It has been well said that “the attitude of inspection is prone.” Wisdom does not inspect, but behold.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The incessant repetition of the same hand-work dwarfs the man, robs him of his strength, wit, and versatility, to make a pin- polisher, and buckle-maker, or any other specialty; and presently, in a change of industry, whole towns are sacrificed like ant-hills, when cotton takes the place of linen, or railways of turnpikes, or when commons are inclosed by landlords.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)