Long-range Experimental Modification of Values, Attitudes, and Behavior

1. Contemporary social psychologists generally agree that a necessary prerequisite to cognitive or attitude change is the presence of a state of imbalance or inconsistency. Two major experimental methods generally employed to create such a psychological state are (a) to induce a person to engage in behavior that is incompatible with his attitudes and values and (b) to expose him to information about the attitudes or values of significant others that are incompatible with his own attitudes and values. In contrast to these two well-known methods, we have employed a third method, namely, to expose a person to information designed to make him consciously aware of states of inconsistency that exist chronically within his own value-attitude system below the level of his conscious awareness. 2. While the main theoretical focus of contemporary social psychology is on the concept of attitude and on theories of attitude change, the present focus is on the concept of value and on a theory of value change. This shift from attitudes to values is made on the assumption that values are more fundamental components within a person's makeup than attitudes and, moreover, that values are de-