Measuring attitudes and points of view : social judgment of proposals for the revision of student stipends in higher education

Abstract

This paper revisits a cognitive debate concerning social judgment and the measurement of attitudes. Whilst use of the Likert scale is pervasive in social research, this paper demonstrates that this method fails to address a critical psychological operation in social judgment, that of interacting with an alternative proposal from the perspective of another. This paper reports a study undertaken with students at the University of Malta (N=247) concerning the issue of revision of the student stipend system. Student attitudes regarding this issue were highly unfavourable to proposals suggesting the curbing of stipends. We hypothesized that strongly held attitudes as well as high ego-­‐relatedness would be associated with closed-­‐mindedness, in terms of the explicit rejection of alternative proposals. Our hypotheses were refuted by the data. The findings demonstrate that students are mostly open-­‐minded about alternative proposals and open to dialogue. The study shows that high ego-­‐relatedness and strongly held attitudes do not short-­‐circuit cognition into closed-­‐mindedness and that in spite of strongly held attitudes, respondents retained ability for cognitive complexity.