Abstract

The present study was carried out to investigate a hypothesis that people will integrate their counterattitudinal beliefs in terms of the descriptive values of an attitude object when they experience the arguments which are against their attitudinal evaluations. A pretest was performed to test the participants' attitude towards capital punishment, rated on the evaluative dimensions (e.g., agreedisagree) or the descriptive dimensions (e.g., human right, social order). Participants were then forced to took a role of counterattitudinal role playing in which they were instructed to write their opinions supporting their counterattitude(the cognitive generation condition) or to write their opinions regarding about an issue irrelevant to the attitude object(the cognition blocking condition). After the role playing, a posttest was performed to test the final attitude toward capital punishment. The changed-magnitude between the two tests was measured on the evaluative and descriptive dimensions. As confirming the prediction, the results of the correlational analyses indicated that (1)in the cognition blocking condition, the positive attitude was positively correlated with the value of social order, but negatively with the value of human right, and (2)in the cognitive generation condition, the positive attitude was positively correlated with the value of social order, but not correlated with the value of human right. For the negative attitude, the same trends observed above were obtained. Obviously, after the role playing, participants combined opposing attitudinal beliefs on the evaluative dimension into an attitude by integrating them in terms of descriptive values.