Attitude Importance and Attitude Accessibility

Across a range of settings, attitudes that people consider personally important have been shown to be more powerful determinants of perceptions of others' attitudes, of liking of others, and of social behavior than unimportant attitudes are. This article reports two studies that evaluate one possible explanation for this difference: the hypothesis that important attitudes may be more accessible in memory and may therefore come to mind more frequently in the course of social perception. In both studies, subjects reported the importance they attached to a series of political attitudes and reported those attitudes on a computer that measured response latencies. Important attitudes were reported more quickly than unimportant ones, even when subjects were instructed to report the first attitudinal cue that came to mind. This finding supports the accessibility hypothesis.