Attitude, Ego-Involvement, and Change

The volume argues that the effect of a persuasive message depends on the receiver's ego-involvement—how central the attitude is to the person's identity and standing in valued groups. For highly involved people, a message close to their own position is assimilated as more similar than it actually is, while a message beyond their latitude of acceptance is contrasted and judged more extreme, often producing a shift away from the advocated position. This rejects the assumption that persuasion is a straightforward function of message content, source credibility, or repetition. The Sherifs and their contributors treat attitude change as a problem of social judgment, anchored in reference groups, rather than as a simple input-output process.

The volume develops social judgment theory and its central constructs—latitudes of acceptance, rejection, and noncommitment, and the assimilation-contrast effects that follow from them. It extends the earlier collaboration between Sherif and Carl Hovland in Social Judgment (1961), but with a different emphasis: Hovland's Yale program focused on source, message, and channel variables that made persuasion more or less effective, while the Sherifs placed the receiver's ego-involvement and reference-group anchors at the center of the explanation. Where the Yale approach asked what makes a message persuasive, the Sherifs asked why the same message persuades some people and boomerangs on others. The two traditions are complementary, but the volume clearly foregrounds the social-judgment framework.

Ego-involvement refers to the degree to which an attitude is tied to the self—to a person's identity, self-esteem, and membership in valued groups. The Sherifs had developed the concept in their earlier work, including The Psychology of Ego-Involvements with Hadley Cantril, and the 1967 volume makes it the pivot of attitude-change theory. The reason is functional: ego-involved attitudes are anchored in reference groups and serve to maintain the person's standing within them, so they are defended more vigorously and are more resistant to persuasion. The volume's empirical chapters examine how varying involvement changes the size of latitudes of acceptance and rejection, and how it predicts whether a message will produce assimilation, contrast, or genuine change.

A frequent misreading treats the volume as claiming that highly involved people are simply resistant to all persuasion. In fact, the framework predicts that involvement changes the pattern of response rather than blocking it. When a message falls within a highly involved person's latitude of acceptance, it is assimilated—judged closer to their own position than it is—and may produce movement toward the message, though often smaller than for less involved people. When a message falls beyond the latitude of acceptance, contrast occurs and the person may shift away. The practical implication is that persuasion of highly involved audiences requires messages positioned near the edge of their acceptance region, not at the position the persuader would ideally like to advocate.

The volume is continuous with the Sherifs' lifelong project of anchoring social psychology in reference groups and ego-involvements rather than in individual attitudes treated as isolated dispositions. It follows their textbook Social Psychology (1956) and their Social Judgment (1961) with Hovland, and it anticipates the later consolidation of their work in Attitude and Attitude Change (1976) with Carl Hovland's successor framework. Across these works, the same core move recurs: attitudes are properties of persons-in-groups, and their stability and change depend on the standards and memberships that give them meaning. The 1967 volume is therefore best read as a mid-career statement of a framework the Sherifs developed across several decades rather than as a standalone contribution.

As with many conference proceedings of the period, the volume's coherence depends on the contributors' willingness to work within the editors' framework, and reviewers at the time noted unevenness across chapters. The book is a collection rather than a single sustained argument, and readers seeking a systematic statement of social judgment theory will find the Sherifs' own monographs more useful. The volume's primary value is documentary: it records how the social-judgment framework was being applied and extended in the mid-1960s by a specific group of researchers associated with the Sherifs' program at the University of Oklahoma. Precise details of the conference and the editorial process are not extensively documented in readily available secondary sources.