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A great deal of research has shown that small changes in question wording, format, orordering can sometimes substantially alter people's reports of their attitudes. Althoughmany scholars have presumed that these so‐called response effects are likely to be morepronounced when the attitudes being measured are weak, a number of studies have disconfirmedthis notion. This paper presents several new tests of this hypothesis using a variety of measuresand analytic techniques. The findings largely replicated previously documented effects andnon‐effects but also uncovered new effects not previously tested. No single strength‐relatedattitude attribute emerged as a consistent moderator of all response effects. Rather, differentindividual attributes moderated different effects, and a conglomeration of strength‐relateddimensions did not emerge as a reliable moderator. Taken together, these results support theconclusions that different response effects occur as the result of different cognitive processes,and that various strength‐related attitude attributes reflect distinct latent constructs rather than asingle one.

A priming paradigm was used to explore the representation of attitudes about government policies in memory. Participants performed pairs of tasks in quick succession. The focal tasks involved evaluating a policy or thinking of one of its consequences. The results showed that thinking of a consequence of a policy speeded up its subsequent evaluation, regardless of whether the participant held a strong or weak attitude about the policy. Evaluating the policy speeded up thinking of one of its consequences for strong attitudes but not for weak ones. In general, it took participants longer to think of a consequence of a policy than to evaluate it. The implications of these results for existing views of the representation of attitudes in memory are discussed.