Attitude heritability and attitude reinforcement: A replication

In a replication of Tesser and Crelia (Personality and Individual Differences, 16, 571–577, 1994), 40 subjects provided their attitudes on items selected from two inventories of political conservatism. (The heritabilities of these items had been previously estimated.) In a second task, subjects chose among four alternatives on each of 50 trials. Each choice type was systematically followed by either a high or low heritability attitude item showing a response that either agreed or disagreed with the subject. The results yielded more consistent support than Tesser and Crelia (1994) for the hypothesis that attitude agreement is more consequential for high than for low heritability attitudes.