Communicating beyond the information given can make the communicator’s attitudes toward a social group more extreme

ABSTRACT

Three experiments tested how communicating attributes of initially liked or disliked groups might create more extreme attitudes. We gave non-neutral participants information about previously unknown groups and asked them to write social media posts describing the group to others. Participants who wrote social media posts to friends (Experiment 1, n = 332) or undecided strangers (Experiments 2 and 3, ns = 113 and 816) exaggerated and elaborated on initial information, subsequently reporting more extreme attitudes. These effects, mediated by extremity of associations to the target group, were interpreted as consistent with theory and research on going beyond the information given. (100 words)

KEYWORDS:

• Attitude change
• extremity
• polarization
• communication
• self-persuasion

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

The data described in this article are openly available in the Open Science Framework at https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/XZP52.

Open scholarship

This article has earned the Center for Open Science badges for Open Data and Open Materials through Open Practices Disclosure. The data and materials are openly accessible at https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/XZP52.

Ethical

This research was approved by Texas Christian University’s Institutional Review Board (Approval of Protocol Number 1920-29) and is in compliance with APA ethical standards in the treatment of human samples; the manuscript or data have not been published previously and are not under consideration for publication elsewhere; and lastly, all authors have contributed significantly to the manuscript and consent their names on the manuscript.

Notes

1. Participants were not asked their race or ethnicity in any of the three experiments, but because they were all U.S. citizens with English as their first language, we assume the distribution found in a previous large-scale survey (Hitlin, 2016).

Additional information

Funding

The author(s) reported there is no funding associated with the work featured in this article.

Notes on contributors

Kaleigh A. Decker

Kaleigh A. Decker is a Ph.D student in experimental psychology. Her research interests involve attitudes, attitude change, and personality.

Charles G. Lord

Charles G. Lord is a professor. His research interests involve attitudes, attitude change, and personality.

Christopher J. Holland

Chistopher J. Holland is an assistant professor. His interests involve motivation, attitude formation, and mate selection.