College essay: Social Judgment Theory

Social Judgment Theory

Of Muzafer Sherif

Social Judgment Theory was coined by Muzafer Sherif in the 1965, as its name suggests, it is a model of judgment, which means that it declares that the audience interprets (judges) a message. Specifically, a listener judges how much the message agrees or disagrees with his or her own attitude. The key point of the Social Judgment Theory is that attitude change (persuasion) is mediated by judgmental processes and effects. Put differently, persuasion occurs at the end of the process where a person understands a message then compares the position it advocates to the person's position on that issue. A person's position on an issue is dependent on three main factors: first the person's most preferred position (their anchor point), second the person's judgment of the various alternatives (spread across their latitudes of acceptance, rejection, and non-commitment), and the last one is the person's level of ego-involvement with the issue.

The aim of the theory is to explain how attitudes (the stands the individuals uphold and cherish about objects, issues, persons, groups or institutions) may change in the communication process. According to Sherif, the attitude change will be less likely to occur if the gap, between attitudes a person already has and the attitudes advised by the message, is big. The theory holds that any person hearing a message will position it on an attitude scales based on his personal judgment. The attitude scale is pre-set in our mind prior to receiving the message and it is composed by three different zones. The Latitude of acceptance, the latitude of non-commitment and the Latitude of rejection.

Furthermore, a consequence of the continuum created by this 3 latitudes as that even though two people may seem to hold identical attitudes, their “most preferred” and “least preferred” alternatives may differ. Someone’s attitude on an issues cannot be summed up with a single point but instead consists of varying degrees of acceptance can be stretched by a credible speaker. And finally, when you’d like to change the attitude of a person or a group or an audience, target their latitude of non-commitment and certainly avoid their latitude of rejection.