Attitude and belief change in explicit and implicit concept hierarchies: A comparison of two models of inter-attitudinal structure

Theories of inter-attitude relationships and attitude change have failed to identify the architecture of inter-attitudinal structures and then clarify its relationship to attitude and belief change. This dissertation examines two models (hierarchical and spatial) of inter-attitudinal structure that explicitly address the consequences of structure for attitude change. Ten pilot studies (N = 271) were conducted to examine explicit and implicit concept hierarchies and develop an appropriate instrument for the final study. The final experiment (N = 391) manipulated type of hierarchy (explicit vs. implicit), whether the hierarchy was primed or not, and the location in the hierarchy to which a message was directed. The hypotheses predict changes in attitudes, evaluative beliefs, and non-evaluative beliefs among hierarchically superordinate, subordinate, and equipollent concepts after participants read persuasive messages about specific target concepts. The results show that, as both models suggest, linguistic organizational structures influence attitude and belief change. However, it is the Galileo spatial model that provides a theoretical structure which makes a correct set of predictions about how concepts affect one another. The results also support the spatial model's suggestion that such inter-attitudinal and inter-belief change is constrained less by a concept's relative position in the structure and more by the strength of the concept's association with other concepts in that structure. Furthermore, within these inter-attitudinal and inter-belief structures, concepts directly targeted by a persuasive message often exhibit less attitude change than related concepts.; Finally, regarding the concepts themselves, the well established structure of an explicit hierarchy of concepts appears to facilitate inter-attitudinal and inter-belief influence much more than the fuzzy structure of an implicit hierarchy of concepts; the key to this facilitation seems to be accessibility of the organizational structure.