On the Fight for Peer Attitude Shaping Rights

"I have a question that I want to ask SU students. My intent in this is not to be sarcastic or start fights, surprisingly; I really am interested and clueless to what a good answer might be. Conservative students of Southwestern, why did you come here? How do you feel being here? How does it feel being so different from the rest of Southwestern students?"

About a month ago, a facebook friend (and real world stranger) posted the above status*, and I felt such a relation to the underlying point that I had no choice to respond. Even though I would not identify myself of conservative, I am an individual fairly moderate in her views and thereby one of the more conservative students at Southwestern (at least in the humanities department--those in the business field tend to be less liberal). As a moderate individual that both attends Southwestern and an evangelical fundamentalist church (which I even hesitate to mention on this SU blog), I am constantly aware of the peer influences on my attitude.

So what do I do with this polarization of attitudes? Before I answer that question, we need to explore what effects peer have on my attitude formation. But before we look at THAT we need to first define what an attitude really is. An attitude is an individual's position when evaluating what they feel (and how strongly they feel!) about a person, thing, or concept. Attitudes are learned and shaped through exposure to persuasion and influence. There are three main determinants of attitudes: genetics, personality, and peers. The last option is the one I will be focusing on.

The best study that illustrates the effect of peers on attitude shaping is a study done in 1943 by Theodore Newcomb. Newcomb studied the specific population of Bennington College in Vermont. Bennington College was a girls-only school whose students came from middle-class conservative families. However, Newcomb noticed that the girls at Bennington College were fairly liberal. When surveying different students of different age groups in the population, Newcomb realized that as the students progressed in their education at Bennington College they quickly became more liberal. The explanation for this discovery was that the exposure to a culture of liberal students and faculty shaped the views of the incoming conservative girls to a more liberal stand point. Thus, peers play an important role in attitude formation.

Humans are social beings. We seek out relationships and have strong desires to fit in. However, unfortunately, there are a lot of divisions withing social groups. These subdivisions often possess conflicting attitudes and ideals, making in-group attitude formation very apparent to those who differ in viewpoint. All in all, to be able to completely relate to a peer group one must have similar attitudes to those within that social subdivision. Here is an old song about subdivisions, proving that they have existed for a long time!

One of the reasons this peer attitude shaping is so salient to me is my unique membership to two wildly different subdivisions of peer groups. For me, liberal and conservative attitudes are both actively present in and (to some extent) shaping my own attitudes. One on hand, my liberal group of friends are very vocal about their attitudes towards things such as drugs,sex, and rock 'n roll! Here are some pictures from a phallic food party we had recently:

There were also breasts in the ice cubes. SUBLIMINAL JOKE.

Boob cupcakes and a pubic hair mound...cake? Thing?

My other group of friends are equally vocal about their attitudes of these same things; however, their attitudes run in the other direction. I am frequently exposed to many heated proclamations of traditional conservative values. There are not really any interesting pictures to go along with that.

So where do I fit into all of this? How are my attitudes changing if I am struggling to fit in to two radically different peer groups? One thing that has been helpful while negotiating these social differences is that attitudes have two different components: direction and intensity. Direction becomes much less important in groups if the intensity is low. If I had high intensity attitudes, there would be quite a lot of clashing of my moderate viewpoints with both of my peer groups (even more than there is now).

However, the most noticeable affect my peers have had on shaping my attitudes has not been so much on WHAT attitudes I hold (since I am being "shaped" in both directions at one, they seem to cancel each other out), but more HOW my attitudes are persuaded by my peers. John Cacioppo and Richard Petty proposed a dual-process model in 1986 that neatly describes how I am subject to attitude formation under these circumstances. Cacioppo's and Petty's dual-process model says that there are two ways that lead to persuasion: the central route and the peripheral route. The central route to persuasion is described as when people's attitudes are persuaded to change by mostly factually-based arguments and content scrutiny. The peripheral route to persuasion is described as when people's attitudes are persuaded to change by mostly superficial cues such as emotion and heuristics.

Since I am being supplied with two opposing arguments for different attitudes, I cannot use the mindless peripheral route as often as I would like to. While it would be nice to be able to listen to my peer's attitudes and engage in a tacit understanding of acceptance, this mutual understanding would not carry over to my other peer group. Therefore, I must summon all of my cognitive resources and scrutinize attitudes for persuasive content and factual integrity before I decided to adopt it into my attitude.

So while peer influence on attitudes may be less obvious or less painful for others, my burden for intentional attitude shaping has given me a plethora of experiences to draw from as we learned about attitude formation and shaping. And it is all not a cognitively-loaded balancing act of attitudes as I may have made it seem. Sometimes there are attitudes, beliefs, likes, and religious songs performed by artists loved by liberals that combine elements of both and are agreeable to all parties (and me!).

Caciappo, J. T.; Petty, R. E.; & Morris, K. (1983). Effects of need for cognition on message evaluation, recall, and persuasion. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 45, 805-818.
Newcomb, T. M. (1943). Personality and social change: Attitude formation in a student community. Ft. Worth, TX: Dryden Press.

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