This research is focused on the effects of attitude importance on people's actions in political contexts. Does attitude importance (1) affect people's willingness to expose themselves to all sides of an issue (2) influence their ability to form cognitive organizational structures through which they might integrate large masses of information (3) affect people's views of the extremity of other's attitudes. All of these issues have implications for understanding the manner in which people's beliefs affect their behavior. The research is focused on political attitudes, and as such, may have some important things to say about the manner in which cognition influences political behavior. The work has important theoretical implications, focused as it is on the manner in which attitude importance affects the processing of information.
