The 1964 presidential election and curves of information seeking and avoiding.

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Abstract
The 1964 presidential election was used as a vehicle to investigate curves of information seeking and avoiding predicted by dissonance theory. Ss strongly committed to 1 or the other of the candidates and clearly conceiving of Goldwater as more conservative than Johnson were confronted with several degrees of dissonant contradiction about the candidates' relative conservatism. Then Ss were offered a choice among political pamphlets whose titles were modeled after items from a political-economic-conservatism scale. The degree to which the several groups sought or avoided these titles approximated the general inverted U curve of combined seeking and avoiding expected from dissonance theory. The points on this curve differed by analysis of variance. An adjustment in the relative steepness of the predicted avoid and seek curves is suggested by the data to explain differences found for avoidance but not for seeking. A control group received the same treatment as the experimental groups, except that the contradictions used to introduce dissonance were not experienced. In combined seeking and avoiding, the control group exhibited significantly greater information selectivity than the experimental groups. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved)

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