Attitude Importance

Hi,

This week’s email is about attitude importance—the extent to which our beliefs feel significant to us.

The information here is mainly from this research article (open-access).

Here are the key practical points you should know:

• The more important our attitude toward something feels to us, the more we engage with the attitude, the stronger the reaction it elicits from us, and the more we resist changing it.

• An attitude can feel important because of self-interest (relating to our rights, privileges, or lifestyle), social identification (relating to groups that we identify with), and values (relating to our basic social and personal values).

• Attitude importance is about our subjective judgment, so it may not align with how important an attitude is to us in reality, or with how important other people think an attitude is to us.

• How strongly we feel about our attitude can be influenced by other factors besides its importance, like how confident we are that we’re right.

• Even when we genuinely have a strong attitude toward something, our behavior might not reflect that for various reasons (reflecting a value-action gap).

As always, I'm happy to hear your thoughts.

Have a great week,
Itamar