Width of the latitude of acceptance as a determinant of attitude change.

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In a study examining the implications of social judgment theory for predicting individual differences in attitude change, a subject received a message advocating a position on birth control either mildly, moderately, or strongly discrepant from his own. For all three levels of discrepancy, the subjects with wide of acceptance on the issue showed greater attitude change than did subjects with either narrow or medium of acceptance. Since a mildly discrepant message was in the lattitude of acceptance even for narrow latitude subjects and a strongly discrepant message in the latitude of rejection even for wide latitude subjects, this finding cannot be reconciled with social judgment theory. Since correlations between latitude widths on birth control and two irrelevant issues were low and latitude width on the irrelevant issues did not relate to attitude change on birth control, width of the latitude of acceptance was interpreted as an issue-specific index of influenceabil ity. Category width, though independent of latitude of acceptance width, also predicted attitude change: narrow categorizers changed their attitudes more than did either medium or broad categorizers. Central to the social judgment approach to attitude change (Sherif, Sherif, & Nebergall, 1965; Sherif & Hovland, 1961) is the assumption that the structure of an individual's attitude is a determinant of receptivity to a persuasive communication. Social judgment theory specifies attitude structure by dividing the attitude dimension into latitudes or regions: a latitude of acceptance, which is the range of positions that an individual accepts, and a latitude of rejection, which is the range of positions that he rejects.4 According to the major hypothesis of