Chapter 14 opened my eyes to something that I have been doing subconsciously for quite sometime now, which was easy for me to understand why I had certain feelings either strongly for or strongly against certain issues and why. I think that the yardstick metaphor was a great way of showing how each and every one of us has a certain range or latitude of acceptance, rejection and noncommitment. These ranges are influenced by our personal stance on a subject and our ability to think about the issue in a certain way may become compromised based on how someone may persuade us in a variety of ways. I think that the airplane example was a nice way of putting this concept in motion. It gave me understanding and insight into our own feelings and emotions towards certain subjects, in this case, airplane safety. The text says that we each have the ability to perhaps be swayed into thinking in certain ways or be persuaded by others who we have close-knit relationships with if they present us with information that may help us to be more easily persuaded, also if we have wide latitude of acceptance. This makes sense to me, because I think that each of us has the ability to expand our minds and stances on subjects, but it is up to us to determine whether or not we want to. This makes sense to me because usually the people who are able to do this must have a wide latitude of acceptance rather than rejection.I must say that Social Judgement Theory makes a lot of sense to me, and it was something that I had always known existed, however, I guess I just didn’t know exactly how it worked until now.
