Perspective as a determinant of attitude change

Abstract

It was hypothesized that the relationship between one's attitudinal beliefs (content) and the way one labels those beliefs (rating) on an evaluative dimension is mediated by perspective, or the range of a ternatives taken into consideration when the individual is making the evaluative judgment. Two experiments were conducted to test this hypothesis. The first experiment showed that the evaluative label the subject assigned to his attitude content was strongly affected by a manipulation of perspective. When matched for length of prison sentence advocated for a convicted criminal, subjects in one perspective condition viewed their recommended punishment as “slightly lenient” whereas those in the other perspective condition rated themselves as “extremely stern”. The second experiment showed that people will change their attitudinal content to remain consistent with their initial self-evaluation under conditions of a manipulated perspective. Subjects were induced, holding initial self-rating constant, to advocate as much as twice as long a prison sentence in one perspective condition than in the other.