Value conflict and thought-induced attitude change

Past research has demonstrated that thought often leads attitudes to become more extreme. Such polarization of attitudes has generally been understood to result from consistency-driven thought. Extending this consistency reasoning, we hypothesized that consistency seeking would not lead to attitude polarization when an issue entails a trade-off between two equally important values. On the basis of the similarity of subjects' rankings of two conflicting issue-relevant values, subjects were categorized as having high or low value conflict regarding a political issue. As predicted, only the attitudes of low value conflict subjects polarized; the attitudes of high value conflict subjects showed a nonsignificant tendency to depolarize. We propose that evaluative incongruity is the central feature underlying structural constraints on attitude polarization.