Deliberation and Attitude Change - 19
an individual’s group that held liberal views. This variable produced two significant
correlations: Moderates had a positive correlation between PercentLiberal and Moveleft
(r = .21, p = .045), and conservatives had a negative relationship between the two (partial
r = -.19, p = .047). In other words, moderate individuals were more likely to drift toward
liberal attitudes when in a discussion group with relatively more liberals, and
conservatives had a contrasting tendency, being more likely to move to the left in groups
with lower percentages of liberals.
Deliberation. Moving to the group level of analysis, the self-report and
observational measures of deliberation were used to examine aggregate attitude shifts in
the groups. Two measures of group-level opinion shift were employed for these analyses:
Moveleft (averaged across group members) and MoveleftVariance, the variance in
Moveleft scores across group members. The latter measure is an illustration of an
interesting methodological opportunity afforded by studying groups: It is possible to
measure not only the central tendencies of groups but also the individual variation within
groups.
We had hypothesized that more deliberative groups would demonstrate greater
overall shifts in attitudes and less heterogeneity in the variation in attitude shift across
group members. Results showed no significant relationships between the observational
measures of deliberation and either of the attitude measures. The self-report measure of
democratic deliberation, however, correlated significantly with MoveleftVariance in a
direction consistent with hypotheses (after controlling for Moveleft itself). Those groups
whose members viewed their discussion as relatively democratic were more likely to
have low variance in the direction of their policy views (partial r = -.38, p = .006).
Convention