THE CATASTROPHIC LINK BETWEEN THE IMPORTANCE AND EXTREMITY OF POLITICAL-ATTITUDES

The catastrophe theory of attitudes (Latane and Nowak, 1994) predicts that unimportant attitudes act as continuous dimensions, with normal d istributions and gradual changes in evaluation, while important attitu des act as categories, with bipolar or unipolar extreme distributions and catastrophic (abrupt) changes in evaluation. A major derivation fr om this theory is that attitude importance and extremity should be cor related, with more important attitudes being more extreme. This predic tion was confirmed for 14 specific political issues at both the group and the individual level, as well as for political involvement and gen eral liberalism. However, general political involvement was not relate d to the extremity of evaluation For specific issues; similarly, parti sanship predicted extremity of general liberalism but not extremity on specific issues. Results suggest that attitude importance and extremi ty must be measured at corresponding levels of specificity in order fo r a relationship between them to hold. These results have implications for attitude change in both individuals and societies.