Avenues for Reducing Tension Produced by Attack on Belief

An experiment was conducted to study avenues of reducing tension produced when an individual experiences a successful attack on a strongly held belief. A relatively gross measure of mood state was employed to evaluate hyp'ed avenues of reducing tension so induced. Indices of belief were obtained to determine whether conversion or reversion had occurred; those of mood represented self-reports of the emotional state of tension-ie, the main dependent variable. In the procedure, a strongly held belief was subjected to a strong attack, & measures of both the success of the attack & the hyp'ed accompanying change in tension were made. Some S's were directed along lines of reversion of belief. Within both these subgroups, some S's were prescribed encoding tasks & some decoding tasks in accordance with their directed patterns of the attitude change, while the remaining S's did not engage in any kinds of COMM activity. The hyp'ed diff'ial degrees of tension reduction accompanying the directed belief changes were again assessed by changes in mood state. Covariance was used for analysis purposes, because repeated measurements were to be made & because of the unstable nature of the main measurement instrument. By its use it was possible to control for initial positions & possible contamination of other related variables. Findings give support to the general notion that changes in evaluation of an object will be accompanied by tension reduction. Specifically, they show that conversion & reversion are equally effective ways of reducing tension, & that COMM activity will facilitate tension reduction. Further, they demonstrate that COMM encoding (writing) activity has a greater tension reduction capacity than COMM decoding (reading) activity. Modified AA.