ATTITUDE HERITABILITY AND ATTITUDE REINFORCEMENT - A TEST OF THE NICHE BUILDING HYPOTHESIS

Recent evidence indicates that attitudes with high heritabilities are more accessible, more resistant to change, and produce larger similari ty-attraction effects (i.e. are stronger) than attitudes with low heri tabilities. These effects may be the outcropping of people constructin g social niches that protect those attitudes which are based on biolog ical predispositions. This niche building framework led to the hypothe sis that attitude reinforcement effects should be more pronounced in t he case of high rather than low heritability attitudes. Subjects (N = 110) were given four choices on up to 50 trials. Each choice type was systematically followed by either a high or low heritability attitude item showing a response that was either similar or dissimilar to the s ubject's. Using two attitude sets and two replications, mixed support was obtained for the hypothesis that the effect of attitude similarity on choice is moderated by heritability. The results are discussed in terms of potential differences in information-processing elicited by t he different attitude sets.