Some Effects of Initial Attitude Importance on Attitude Change

Summary Twenty students holding either important or moderately important initial attitudes wrote counterattitudinal essays to provide a test of competing predictions derived from Festinger's cognitive dissonance theory and Bem's self-perception theory. As expected by self-perception theory, subjects holding important initial attitudes showed less attitude change after counterattitudinal advocacy than did subjects holding moderately important initial attitudes. Additional data suggested that this differential attitude change was not attributable to a subject selection bias or to the production of differentially persuasive essays across the two importance conditions.