A Relatively Ignored Mediational Variable in Deliberation

Deliberation often causes people to change their attitudes. One reason this may happen is because deliberation also causes people’s values to change. Thus, one mediational model is as follows: change in values causes change in attitudes. However, deliberation can also cause people to connect their attitudes better with their values, without changing those values. This may mean that ceteris paribus, same values yield different attitudes post-treatment. For identification, one may want to devise a treatment that changes respondent’s ability to connect values to attitudes but has no impact on values. Or a researcher may try to gain insight by measuring people’s ability to connect values to attitudes in current experiments, and estimating mediational models. One can also simply try simulation (again subject to the usual concerns): use post-treatment model (regressing attitudes on values), use pre-deliberation values, and simulate attitudes.