| Social psychologiSts have traditionally conceptualized attitudes asenduring dispositions to resPond to some object, person, issue, or eved in apositive or negative manner. The evaluative responses are cognitivelyrepresened in memory and may be direct1y activated in the presence -of theobject or its cue. More recen1 theories and researches, howeveI, have begun tosuspect the stability of attitudes and argued that people s atttudes at a givenmoment in time were episodically constrUcted on the basis of temP0rarilysalient, or accessible pieces Of information. The constructionist persPective forthe strUcture of attitude mainly derives from the attitude contex1 effec1s survey.Attitude context effeCts refer to the phenomena that the attitude reaction isaffected by the context wthin which it is expressed, such as the situation, thePrior item, or the Previous cognitive action. The effects of context wereespecial1y marked when the context item was presented immediate1y prior 1othe target item and when the context and target items were close1y relawh. Mostof people in1erpreted the context effects with belief accessibility. That is.previous cotwon selectively activated some pieces of information, onceactivated, they would have high accessibility and be readily aPplied to thefollowing infOrmation integration. Then there wil1 be a deviation ofatttudes.The context effeCts poweffolly suPPort the atti tud e-aS-temporaryedon -structure. This makes it flexible fOr peOPle to adaP to the environment, but it isnot the people's ends. So some theorists hyPottiesized tha the anitUde Strengthmoderates the size of context effects in order to reconcile the contradictionsbbeen anitude- as- Stabl e -constfucts and atti tll d e - as -t ernporary - co n StrUct io n s.They argued that attitudes marked by strength-related attributes (i.e.. highlevel of accessibility, importance, intemal consistency, extremity, certainty,much knowledge, though and intensity and low level of ambiva1ence) are bothmore stable over time and more resistant to persuasion, WheTeas the weakattitUdes lack those qualities and v-ulnerable to context effees. But the Previousexperiments based on strength-moderated hypothesis had not verified thatstrOng attitudes were any less suscePtible to context effects than the weakattitudes. Lavine(1998) attribued this disability to the low validity of theattitude strength measurement- He hyPothesized and succeeded in testing thastrength-moderated conteXt effeCts may emerge only when allitude strCngth wasconceptUalized in a more comPrhenive, multidimensional mannerSo this research fOllowed those former researches and continued to test thehypothesis of attitude Strength-moderated context effects. ExPeriment l whichadoPted an item context effect ParadigIn reviewed the effect of de strengthmodera1ing context effects. ln this experiment, respondents fiYSt complctedmultiple measures of attitude strength. Three weeks later, they ParticiPated in acontext-effect eXPeriment which was designed as 2(attitude strength' strOng vs. -weak) X 2(context valence: positive vs. Passive) between subjects design.Experiment 2 adopted 2(at'titude strength: strong vs. weak) X 2(context valence fpositive vs. passive) X2 (Processing level f high vs. loW between subjectsdesign. Its procedure was the same as in experiment 1. But this time.coghtive task was aPPlied as context instead of question item, and the attitudesemanically differential analysis scale rePlaced single question item. 270students of LaiXi No. l High School participated in this research.From the above two experiments, the result indicated fl- Attitude strength moderated the size of attitude context effects, respondentswith weak anitudes exhibited significamly larger context effect, while thosewith strong anitudes anchored "no effeCt".2. Attitude strength moderated context effects more significantly Whenprocessing levels were comPared' The higher the... |
