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:
“... woman’s narrow and purist attitude toward life makes her a greater danger to liberty wherever she has political power. Man has long overcome the superstitions that still engulf women.”
—Emma Goldman (1869–1940)
“Where we come from in America no longer signifies—it’s where we go, and what we do when we get there, that tells us who we are.
The irony of the role of women in my business, and in so many other places, too, was that while we began by demanding that we be allowed to mimic the ways of men, we wound up knowing we would have to change those ways. Not only because those ways were not like ours, but because they simply did not work.”
—Anna Quindlen (b. 1952)