Attitude heritability and attitude reinforcement: A test of the niche building hypothesis

• Published in: Personality and individual differences 1994-04, Vol.16 (4), p.571-577
• Main Authors: Tesser, Abraham, Crelia, Rick
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Attitudes; Behavior. Attitude; Biological and medical sciences; Fundamental and applied biological sciences. Psychology; Genetic aspects; Psychology. Psychoanalysis. Psychiatry; Psychology. Psychophysiology; Social psychology
• ISSN: 0191-8869; 1873-3549
• DOI: 10.1016/0191-8869(94)90184-8

Recent evidence indicates that attitudes with high heritabilities are more accessible, more resistant to change, and produce larger similarity-attraction effects (i.e. are stronger) than attitudes with low heritabilities. These effects may be the outcropping of people constructing social niches that protect those attitudes which are based on biological predispositions. This niche building framework led to the hypothesis that attitude reinforcement effects should be more pronounced in the case of high rather than low heritability attitudes. Subjects ( N = 110) were given four choices on up to 50 trials. Each choice type was systematically followed by either a high or low heritability attitude item showing a response that was either similar or dissimilar to the subject's. Using two attitudes sets and two replications, mixed support was obtained for the hypothesis that the effect of attitude similarity on choice is moderated by heritability. The results are discussed in terms of potential differences in information-processing elicited by the different attitude sets.