Abstract
The variable perspective approach to social attitudes was inspired by two events that occurred when the present authors worked together as faculty advisor and research assistant. One was a challenge by a granting agency to defend the use of Thurstone’s equal-appearing intervals scaling procedure in light of evidence that judges’ attitudes affect their judgments of opinion statements (Hovland & Sherif, 1952). The other was a televised interview of retiring President Dwight Eisenhower in which he described his manner of making political decisions. The first event led to a study in which it was demonstrated that judges whose own positions are not included in the range of statements offered for judgment act as though their positions were included, thereby effectively extending the range (Upshaw, 1962). In other words, the perspectives assumed by judges appeared to vary according to the judges’ own attitudes when those attitudes were out of the range of a set of items that were judged.
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Upshaw, H.S., Ostrom, T.M. (1984). Psychological Perspective in Attitude Research. In: Eiser, J.R. (eds) Attitudinal Judgment. Springer Series in Social Psychology. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4613-8251-5_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4613-8251-5_2
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