Osgood, C.E. & Tannenbaum, P.H. (1955). The principle of congruity in the prediction of attitude change. Psychological Review, 62(1), 42-55.
This article presents and experimentally tests the congruity theory of attitude change.
The congruity theory of attitude change, which is the theoretical framework of the study, holds that:(a) people strive to maintain consistency among the components of their belief system; (b) the components of a person's belief system most likely to produce attitude change are the existing attitude toward the message, the existing attitude toward the source of the message, and the nature of the message itself (a positive or negative message); (c) inconsistency in the components of one's belief system motivates behavior to resolve it; and (d) resolution will also be in the direction of restoring cognitive consistency to the belief system.
The study does not formulate research questions; rather it tests the following hypotheses:
1. The less neutral existing attitudes (toward content of a message and/or source), the greater the attitude change.
2. Attitude change (toward content of a message and/or source) will occur in the direction of the greatest amount of pressure toward cognitive consistency.
3. Weakly held attitudes (toward message and/or source) are more susceptible to change than strongly held attitudes.
4. An existing attitude of favorableness toward a source will lead to greater attitude change in proportion to the degree of favorableness.
5. If an existing attitude toward a source is different and non-neutral from an existing non-neutral attitude toward the content of a message, the greatest attitude change will occur in the most polarized attitude.
The attitudes of college students toward a given concept and a given source were pretested using the semantic differential (a seve
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