The Catastrophe of Attitudes

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The Catastrophe of Attitudes

• Bibb Latané
• Center for Human Science

Thanks to Andrzej Nowak, Jacek Sjamrej, Jim Liu
and Helen Harton. See Latané Nowak (1994)
Attitudes as catastrophes From dimensions to
categories with increasing involvement for more
information.
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The Failure of MinoritiesMyth or Reality?

• In the 1950s, Americans became concerned that
  mass media, mass transportation, mass production
  would lead to a boring, deindividuated,
  homogeneous society
• The Melting Pot theory of American immigration
• Sloan Wilson, The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit
• David Reisman, The Lonely Crowd
• Social Psychologists seemed to concur
• Leon Festinger, Pressures to uniformity in groups
• Yale Studies in Attitude Change
• Bob Abelson, Unchecked influence leads to
  inexorable uniformity

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Simulating the Societal Consequences of
Incremental Influence
Initial random distribution of attitudes, with
30 of the population at one extreme of the
continuum, and 70 at the other. Note that the
close-up view on the right corresponds to the
outlined region above.
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Attitudes are converging toward the initial mean,
and they are clustering, such that similar
attitudes tend to group together.
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After 150 steps, the system has almost completely
unified at the initial mean attitude. Soon, there
will be total uniformity of opinion.
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Perhaps Attitude Change Isnt So Incremental
American-- Catastrophe Sudden turn for the
worse French Catastrophe Sudden turn for the
worse René Thom (French mathematician)
Catastrophe transition from
incremental to sudden change Catastrophe Theory,
trendy in the 1970s, now is derogated as
superficial because most of its mathematics
cannot be applied to real situations. Our cusp
model is designed only to illustrate a theorized
relationship, not to make quantitative claims.
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Disciplinary Diversity
OrganizedKnowledgeStructures
Points on aDimension
Positions inIssue Space
CategoricalJudgments
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Catastrophe theory of attitudes

• For unimportant issues, favorability will
  increase with information positivity.
• For positive information, favor-ability will
  increase with issue involvement.
• For negative information, favorability will
  decrease with issue involvement.
• With increasing involvement, people will tend to
  have either very positive or very negative
  attitudes, even with intermediate information.

• 5. For uninvolving issues, the distribution
  of attitudes should be normal.
• For involving issues, it should be either bimodal
  or unipolar and extreme, depending on information
  favorability.