Attitude Strength: Antecedents and Consequences

The volume's core claim is that attitudes differ meaningfully in strength, and that this difference explains why some attitudes predict behavior while others do not. It rejects the implicit assumption in much attitude research that all measured attitudes are functionally equivalent. A 1997 PsycCRITIQUES review by Sharon Shavitt framed the book as a response to 'the disappointment often elicited by attitudinal data,' noting that researchers could either identify which attitudes predict outcomes or specify when prediction succeeds . Petty and Krosnick chose the first path, arguing that strong attitudes—those high on dimensions like importance, certainty, and accessibility—are the consequential ones.

The book organizes research around multiple strength-related properties, each addressed in dedicated chapters. These include attitude extremity (Abelson), vested interest (Crano), attitude importance (Boninger, Krosnick, Berent, and Fabrigar), personal involvement (Thomsen, Borgida, and Lavine), attitude certainty (Gross, Holtz, and Miller), attitude accessibility (Fazio), amount and accuracy of information (Davidson), attitudinal ambivalence (Thompson, Zanna, and Griffin), and structural consistency (Chaiken, Pomerantz, and Giner-Sorolla) . The editors' overview chapter argues these dimensions are empirically distinct and should not be collapsed into a single index, a methodological position that shaped subsequent measurement practice.

The 1997 PsycCRITIQUES review by Shavitt described the book as providing 'a comprehensive review' of attitude strength research and noted that 'the conclusions emerging from the various research streams described in this volume fit well together' . The review praised Philip Converse's foreword for supplying historical context and acknowledged that most chapters focus on their authors' own research programs, though some provide broader coverage. Shavitt concluded that the volume 'establishes attitude strength as a fundamental class of variables in the psychology of attitudes,' a judgment that has held: the book remains heavily cited in attitude research decades after publication.

The ELM, developed by Petty and Cacioppo in the 1980s, provides the theoretical backdrop for the volume's treatment of one strength dimension: elaboration. The chapter by Petty, Haugtvedt, and Smith argues that attitudes formed through high elaboration—careful scrutiny of arguments—are more persistent, resistant, and predictive of behavior than attitudes formed through peripheral cues . This chapter effectively applies the ELM's central-peripheral distinction to the attitude strength problem. The volume as a whole, however, extends beyond ELM by cataloguing strength dimensions—importance, certainty, accessibility—that operate independently of elaboration history.

A frequent oversimplification treats attitude strength as a single unitary construct, assuming that an attitude high on one dimension (say, importance) is automatically high on all others. The volume explicitly rejects this. Its chapters demonstrate that importance, certainty, accessibility, and extremity are empirically separable and often diverge. Someone can hold an attitude with high certainty but low importance, or high accessibility but low structural consistency. The editors argue that researchers must specify which strength dimension they are measuring and why, rather than treating 'strong attitude' as a general category. This methodological precision is the book's most durable contribution to the field.