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Partisan language, immediacy, and attitude change
Author(s) -
Eiser J. Richard,
Ross Michael
Publication year - 1977
Publication title -
european journal of social psychology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.609
H-Index - 111
eISSN - 1099-0992
pISSN - 0046-2772
DOI - 10.1002/ejsp.2420070406
Subject(s) - immediacy , psychology , capital punishment , social psychology , punishment (psychology) , expression (computer science) , philosophy , criminology , epistemology , computer science , programming language
In an experiment to study the effects of attitudes and immediacy of verbal expression of requiring subjects to emply evaluatively biased language, 28 male und felmale college students wrote essays on the topic of capital punishment. They were not forced to write either for or against the issue, but were required to incorporate a list of either 15 pro‐bias words, which implied a negative evaluation of abolition, or 15 anti‐bias words which implied a negative evaluation of capital punishment. It was predicted that subjects' final attitudes would be more pro capital punishment after using pro‐bias words, and this was confirmed for subjects' final self‐ratings ( p <.05). However, alternative measures of subjects' final attitudes implied that the bias manipulation had a consistent effect in the predicted direction only for subjects whose initial attitudes were congruent with the words they used (i.e., pro subjects in the pro‐bias condition and anti subjects in the anti‐bias condition) incorporated more of the words provided ( p <.01) and employed more immediate forms of expression ( p <.025) than subjects required to use words incongruent with their intial attitudes. These results were not replicated when 19 further subjects were required to incorporate comparable lists of statements rather than words, suggesting that the effects of the word‐lists were not due to their providing subjects with ready‐made persuasive arguments.