Does Learning Others' Opinions Change One's Opinions?

Two experiments examined the attitudinal effects of mere exposure to others' attitudes. Both experiments replicated previous findings that people exposed to others' judgments often then exceed those judgments when indicating their own opinions. The first experiment indicated that (1) expos...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Personality & social psychology bulletin 1980-06, Vol.6 (2), p.253-260
Main Authors: Myers, David G., Bruggink, James B., Kersting, Robert C., Schlosser, Barbara A.
Format: Article
Language:English
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Summary:Two experiments examined the attitudinal effects of mere exposure to others' attitudes. Both experiments replicated previous findings that people exposed to others' judgments often then exceed those judgments when indicating their own opinions. The first experiment indicated that (1) exposure to only a small number of others' responses (rather than a large distribution, as in previous experiments) will still produce the effect, that (2)face-to-face exposure and statistical exposure to others' opinions elicit much the same effect, and that (3) making a public pretest commitment attenuates the phenomenon. The second experiment revealed that observing others' judgments on onescale also influenced responding on a separate, but related judgment scale. This indicates that the effect of mere exposure to others' attitudes is not just a response effect that is specific to the scale on which others' responses have been observed
ISSN:0146-1672
1552-7433
DOI:10.1177/014616728062011