Compliance, identification, and internalization three processes of attitude change

TLDR

The study builds on prior work presented at the 1956 APA meeting, was funded by the Yale Communication Research Program and the Rockefeller Foundation, and emphasizes the need to understand the depth of attitude changes to predict subsequent behavior. The authors investigate whether communication induces public conformity without private acceptance or whether it also leads to private acceptance. The experiment was conducted at Johns Hopkins University while the author served as a Public Health Service Research Fellow of the National Institute of Mental Health. Cf.

Abstract

1 An earlier draft of this paper was written while the author was with the Laboratory of Psychology, National Institute of Mental Health, and was read at the annual meeting of the American Psychological Association in Chicago on August 30, 1956. The experiment reported here was conducted while the author was at Johns Hopkins University as a Public Health Service Research Fellow of the National Institute of Mental Health. Additional financial support was received from the Yale Communication Research Program, which is under the direction of Carl I. Hovland and which is operating under a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation. The author is particularly grateful to James Owings for his help in running the experiment; to Ramon J. Rhine and Janet Baldwin Barclay for their help in analysis of the data; and to Roger K. Williams, Chairman of the Psychology Department at Morgan State College, for the many ways in which he facilitated collection of the data. nication produce public conformity without private acceptance, or did it produce public conformity coupled with private acceptance? (Cf. 1, 4.) Only if we know something about the nature and depth of changes can we make meaningful predictions about the way in which attitude changes will be reflected in subsequent actions and reactions to events.