Abstract
In a paper published in Psychological Review, Greenwald, Pratkanis, Leippe, and Baumgardner (1986) argued that the most useful and effective method of theory development is to seek the limiting conditions of known findings, what Greenwald et al. called “condition-seeking.” That is, Greenwald and his colleagues argued that the best way to understand why a phenomenon occurs is to identify when it does not occur. This is a way to determine the conditions that are necessary in order for a particular effect to appear, thus increasing the precision of one’s theoretical account of it. More importantly, condition-seeking can be a very effective way to identify the mechanisms by which a particular effect occurs.
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Notes
Schuman and Presser (1981, p. 71) indicated that their data revealed that less educated respondents tended to show stronger response-order effects but that none of the interactions with education that they examined approached statistical significance. However, no quantitative results were formally reported, and a meta-analysis might well have revealed a significant overall effect when the various experiments were combined in a single analysis. I am therefore reluctant to accept the conclusion of no association between the size of response-order effect and education.
Instead of measuring attitude importance, Crano (1983) manipulated it by altering the perceived relevance of an issue for subjects. Increased importance was associated with an increase in the magnitude of the false-consensus effect. I suspect that the difference between this result on the one hand and Campbell’s (1986) and the present findings on the other is due to the different operationalizations of attitude importance.
Weinstein (1984) failed to find a stronger false-consensus effect under the others/self order compared with the self/others order. This inconsistency with the preponderance of published results is difficult to explain.
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© 1992 Springer-Verlag New York, Inc.
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Krosnick, J.A. (1992). The Impact of Cognitive Sophistication and Attitude Importance on Response-Order and Question-Order Effects. In: Schwarz, N., Sudman, S. (eds) Context Effects in Social and Psychological Research. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4612-2848-6_14
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4612-2848-6_14
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