Abstract This study tests the hypothesis that attitudes people consider to be personally important are more stable over relatively long periods than are attitudes people consider unimportant. Latent variable structural equation models are applied to political attitude data collected during the 1980 and 1984 American presidential election campaigns. These analyses support the claim that important attitudes change less over time than unimportant attitudes. The lower over-time consistency of reports of unimportant attitudes was found to be due to true attitude change and not to reduced motivation to report these attitudes carefully or to greater ambiguity in internal attitudinal cues associated with them.