Age and Susceptibility to Attitude Change Free Essay Example, 2000 words

A study which has investigated the relationship between age and susceptibility to attitude change is that conducted by Krosnick and Alwin. In this study, data were collected over a long period of time and focused on the political attitudes of a representative sample of American adults between 1956 and 1976. The data was taken from interviews in the National Election Study series. One set of interviews focused on 1132 people interviewed in 1956, 1958 and 1960. The second looked at 1130 people interviewed at the 1970, 1972 and 1974 elections. The aim of the study was to investigate to what extent attitude towards different political parties had changed among different age groups over these four year periods. This study returned results which would support the argument in Albarracin et al. (2005) that there is a period of time up to young adulthood when a person is particularly likely to change their attitude, after which there is a trend towards a limited tendency to attitude change. This is referred to by Kronsnick and Alwin (1989: p. 421) as the impressionable years hypothesis . In this hypothesis, susceptibility to attitude change is high, and then suddenly drops and remains consistent at a lower level thereafter. We will write a custom essay sample on Age and Susceptibility to Attitude Change or any topic specifically for you Only $17.96 $11.86/page 1390) hypothesis, which argues that there is no relationship between aging and attitude change susceptibility. In addition, they cite the lifelong openness (p. 1390) hypothesis which suggests that there is a relatively stable relationship between age and attitude change throughout life.