Deliberate oscillating attitude change is too nonsensical to explain survey data

Evidence

It can be shown that there is no single meaningful process of change shared by all respondents that would generate this configuration of data. In fact, even if we assume that there is a relatively limited number of change processes present in the population, we find that only two such models could generate these observations. The first of these models posits that some of the respondents managed in a deliberate way to locate themselves from one measurement to another on the opposite side of an issue from the one they had selected at the preceding measurement. It would have to be assumed that a person who chose a leftish alternative on a certain issue in the first measure would be motivated to remember to seek out the rightish alternative two years later, the leftish again 2 years after that, and so on. Naturally, an assumption that this behavior characterizes one member of the population is sufficiently nonsensical for us to reject it out of hand. — John T. Jost and Jim Sidanius, Political Psychology, 1948

Categorization

• DEFINE: Illustrates the model-diagnostic reasoning used to rule out change processes by testing what data-generating processes could plausibly produce the observed pattern.