ego-involvement

자료 1: The Blackwell Encyclopedia of Social Psychology

The extent to which a task or issue is personally significant or motivating to an individual, and hence carries implications for that individual's self-concept and self-esteem.

Closely related to salience. According to Sherif and Hovland (1961), it mediates social judgment by leading to biased reinterpretation of attitude statements and messages.

• Individuals high in ego-involvement on some issue are assumed to find fewer viewpoints discrepant from their own as still acceptable, i.e., they have narrower “latitudes” of acceptance and non-commitment and wider latitudes of rejection. 
• This is hypothesized to lead to assimilation-contrast effects in judgments of attitude statements, and to “boomerang effects” in reactions to communications advocating rejected viewpoints. Empirical support is patchy, with effects of ego-involvement and attitude extremity often indistinguishable. According to the elaboration likelihood model, involvement leads to more thorough processing of persuasive messages, and to strong arguments producing more attitude change.

See also: attitude change; self-esteem; social judgment. (1961). Social judgment: Assimilation and contrast effects in communication and attitude change. New Haven, CT: Yale. University Press. ... [log in or subscribe to read full text]


자료 2: http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/ego-involvement

an involvement of one's self-esteem in the performance of a task or in an object 

자료3: Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_judgment_theory#Ego-involvement

(... ...) All social attitudes are not cumulative, especially regarding issues where the attitude is extreme (Sherif et al., 1965). This means that a person may not agree with less extreme stands relative to his/her position, even though they may be in the same direction. Furthermore, even though two people may seem to hold identical attitudes, their "most preferred" and "least preferred" alternatives may differ. Thus, a person's full attitude can only be understood in terms of what other positions he/she finds acceptable (or not) in addition to his/her own stand (Nebergall, 1966). This continuum illustrates a crucial point of SJT, referred to as the "latitudes of acceptance, rejection, and noncommitment". These latitudes compose, respectively, a range of preferred, offensive, and indifferent attitudes. The placement of positions along the continuum hinges on the anchor point, usually determined by the individual's own stand (Sherif & Hovland, 1961). Therefore, one's attitude on a social issue can not be summed up with a single point but instead consists of varying degrees of acceptability for discrepant positions.
These degrees or latitudes together create the full spectrum of an individual's attitude. Sherif and Hovland (1961) define the latitude of acceptance "as the range of positions on an issue ... an individual considers acceptable to him (including the one 'most acceptable' to him)" (p. 129). On the opposite of the continuum lies the latitude of rejection. This is defined as including the "positions he finds objectionable (including the one 'most objectionable" to him)" (Sherif & Hovland, 1961, p. 129). This latitude of rejection was deemed essential by the SJT developers in determining an individual's level of involvement and thus his/her propensity to attitude change. The greater the rejection latitude, the more involved the individual is in the issue and thus is harder to persuade. In the middle of these opposites lies the latitude of noncommitment, a range of viewpoints where one feels primarily indifferent.

It was speculated by the SJT researchers that extreme stands, and thus wide latitudes of rejection, were a result of high ego-involvement. According to the 1961 Sherif and Hovland work, the level of ego-involvement depends upon whether the issue "arouses an intense attitude or, rather, whether the individual can regard the issue with some detachment as primarily a 'factual' matter" (p. 191). Religion, politics, and family are examples of issues that typically result in highly involved attitudes; they contribute to one's self-identity (Sherif et al., 1965).
The concept of involvement is the crux of SJT. In short, Sherif et al. (1965) speculated that individuals who are highly involved in an issue are more likely to evaluate all possible positions, therefore resulting in an extremely limited or nonexistent latitude of noncommitment. High involvement also means that individuals will have a more restricted latitude of acceptance. Because discrepant positions are less tolerable when a person is highly involved, more messages will fall into the latitude of rejection, which under this condition is wider. According to SJT, messages falling within the latitude of rejection are unlikely to successfully persuade. Therefore, highly involved individuals will be harder to persuade per SJT (Sherif & Hovland, 1961; Sherif et al., 1965). (... ...)