Asking About Attitude Change

Abstract Surveys often ask respondents how information or events changed their attitudes. Does information X make you more or less supportive of policy Y? Does scandal X make you more or less likely to vote for politician Y? We show that this type of question (the change format) exhibits poor measurement properties, in large part because subjects engage in response substitution. When asked how their attitudes changed, people often report the level of their attitudes rather than the change in them. As an alternative, we propose the counterfactual format, which asks subjects what their attitude would have been in the counterfactual world in which they did not know the treatment information. Using a series of experiments embedded in four studies, we show that the counterfactual format greatly reduces bias relative to the change format.