The development of interattitudinal consistency: The shared-consequences model

A model of interattitudinal consistency was proposed to address: (a) the factors mediating political expert-novice differences in interattitudinal organization and (b) the processes mediating the development of interattitudinal organization among political novices. In Experiment 1, both expertise and situationally induced thought (among novices) heightened the extent to which pairs of policies were viewed as instrumentally influencing the attainment of a common set of values, which in turn influenced the structural balance of participants' attitudes. Moreover, both expertise and thought (among experts) heightened the ideological consistency of participants' attitudes. In Experiment 2, thought related to values or implicational relations increased the structural balance of novices' attitudes, whereas ideology-related thought increased the ideological consistency of experts' attitudes. Discussion focuses on a general consequences-based model of interattitudinal structure.