dynamics of attitudes: Individual beliefs to cultural norms

Dynamic social impact theory (DSIT; Latane, 1996a; 1996b), a macro-level theory of social influence, predicts that discussion will lead to a self-organization of public opinion through decreasing minority sizes, increasing spatial similarity, and emerging correlations. The catastrophe theory of attitudes (CTA; Latane & Nowak, 1994), a micro-level theory, suggests that attitudes are a joint function of issue involvement and information favorability. This paper describes the predictions leading from these theories separately and as integrated and meta-analytically combines analyses of almost 500 students discussing social and political issues over a computer network with twenty previous studies testing aspects of CTA. The results of an original computer simulation are also described. Involving attitudes are extreme and change nonlinearly, and involvement mediates thought-, information-, and discussion-induced attitude polarization. Involvement also relates to persuasion and the self-organization of opinion. These studies show converging support for CTA and DSIT and suggest that combining these theories may increase our ability to track the evolution of attitudes from individual beliefs to cultural norms.