WHEN IT IS EMBEDDED, IT IS POTENT - EFFECTS OF GENERAL ATTITUDE EMBEDDEDNESS ON FORMATION OF SPECIFIC ATTITUDES AND BEHAVIORAL INTENTIONS

Attitude embeddedness, defined as the degree of connectedness of an at titude to other cognitive elements, was operationalized as the number of free associations subjects produced in relation to the attitude iss ue. Two experiments demonstrated that embeddedness moderated the effec ts of general attitudes on specific attitudes in situations that were ambiguously related to general attitudes. Highly embedded general atti tudes but not low-embedded general attitudes toward capital punishment or the right to die served as a basis for the formation of specific e valuations of situations that were only moderately relevant for the br oader issue. A third experiment demonstrated that highly embedded atti tudes toward preservation of the environment were more strongly relate d to behavioral intentions than low-embedded attitudes were.