Structural consistency and attitude strength.

Abstract

(from the chapter) summarize research showing that attitudes relatively high in evaluative-cognitive consistency behave the way attitude theorists and researchers expect strong attitudes to behave / discuss evidence suggesting that such attitudes are strong because they are accompanied by a well-organized set of supporting cognitions that mutes the change impact of new counterattitudinal information and that also enables their possessors to actively refute such information / summarize data indicating that evaluative-cognitive consistency is not reducible to other common indicators of attitude strength (chapter) [addresses] evaluative-affective consistency / it refers to the degree of consistency that exists between people's overall evaluations of attitude objects and the evaluative meaning of the emotions, feelings, moods, and sympathetic nervous system activity they experience in relation to these objects / suggest that simultaneous consideration of evaluative-cognitive and evaluative-affective consistency provides a means of diagnosing the cognitive vs affective basis of people's attitudes, and that knowledge of an attitude's structural basis is crucial to understanding the concept of attitude strength / charts the theoretical and empirical road that led to these ideas