ABSTRACT
The notion of attitude strength has enjoyed con-siderable interest among social psychologists recently. Petty and Krosnick (in press) argue that attitude strength is a multidimensional concept that expresses itself in multiple ways such as attitude importance, attitude accessibility, and attitude extremity (see also Krosnick, Boninger, Chuang, Berent, & Carnot, 1993). The aspect of attitude strength that is of interest for our purposes is attitude extremity. This construct has been shown to have powerful effects on behavior, memory, and judgment. Extreme attitudes are more consistent with behaviors (Fazio & Zanna, 1978; Petersen & Dutton, 1975) and are more resistant to persuasion than moderate attitudes (Ewing, 1942; Osgood & Tannenbaum, 1955; Sarat & Vidmar, 1976). Individuals with extreme attitudes tend to remember congruent information to a greater extent than less extreme individuals (Roberts, 1984). Finally, extreme attitudes seem to be associated with judgments that a larger proportion of others share one’s own point of view (Allison & Messick, 1988; Crano, Gorenflo, & Shackelford, 1988).
