Previous work by Tesser (1993) and Bourgeois (2002) found that heritable attitudes are more resistant to social influence and attitude change. The present study sought to replicate and extend previous work by utilizing attitudes and heritability estimates not previously used in studies examining the effect of heritable attitudes on social influence processes. It was hypothesized that attitudes with higher heritability estimates would change less after group discussion relative to attitudes with lower heritability estimates. As predicted, highly heritable attitudes did show greater resistance to social influence in the context of group discussion. The present findings add further support to the notion that attitude heritability is an important element of attitude change and extend previous work through the study of novel attitudes and heritability estimates.
The transmission of attitudes, behaviors, and beliefs between members of an interacting social network is among the most widely supported phenomena in social psychology (Cialdini & Goldstein, 2004). From Newcomb’s (1958) early work on college roommates to Festinger, Schachter, and Back’s (1950) seminal work on MIT apartment complexes, decades of field and lab studies indicate that shared social space results in shared social identities and preferences (Harton & Bullock, 2007). Dynamic social impact theory (DSIT; Latané, 1996; Nowak, Szamrej, & Latané, 1990) suggests that as people influence each other their behaviors and attitudes become more similar (Harton et al., 1998, Latané and Bourgeois, 1996 and Latané and Bourgeois, 2000), resulting in the emergence of stable social and cultural norms (Cullum and Harton, 2007 and Harton et al., 2003).
Yet not all social information is equal, and some attitudes and beliefs are more or less resistant to social influence relative to others. A wealth of work on attitudes strongly indicates that the intensity with which an attitude is held, an attitude’s strength, significantly impacts a variety of attitudinal processes. Specifically, strong attitudes are more readily expressed, provide a more reliable basis for predicting future behavior, and are more resistant to change over time and in the presence of social influence ( Petty & Krosnick, 1995).
While surprising, Tesser (1993) has suggested that attitude heritability may affect attitudes in a manner similar to importance ( Krosnick, 1988), accessibility ( Fazio, 1995), and commitment ( Abelson, 1988). Indeed, twin studies have found that attitude heritability accounted for twenty-five percent of the variance in attitude importance and strength ( Olson, Vernon, Aitken Harris, & Jang, 2001), indicating that heritability is related to attitude strength and thus is apt to have similar consequences for social influence and attitude change.
