27. Attitudes Flashcards
An association between an act or an object and an evaluation
Attitude
Refers to the durability and impact of an attitude.
Attitude strength
An attitude is ____ if it tends to persist over time and is resistant to change.
durable
An attitude has ____ if it affects behaviour and influences the way the person thinks and feels.
impact
Refers to the personal relevance of an attitude and the psychological significance of that attitude for an individual.
Attitude importance
Refers to the ease with which an attitude comes to mind. Highly accessible attitudes come to mind rapidly and automatically when primed by environmental events.
Attitude accessibility
As with emotions, motives and cognitions, social psychologists are increasingly recognising the importance of distinguishing between explicit (conscious) attitudes and ____ ____ – associations between attitude objects and feelings about them that regulate thought and behaviour unconsciously and automatically.
Implicit attitudes
An important dimension on which attitudes differ is their ____ ____ – the intricacy of thoughts about different attitude objects.
Cognitive complexity
The beliefs of two people with equally positive attitudes towards a tax cut may have very different levels of ____.
complexity
Researchers studying ____ ____ – the extent to which a given attitude object is associated with conflicting evaluative responses – argue that attitudes include two evaluative dimensions, positive and negative, that are relatively independent.
Attitude ambivalence
Low positive/low negative attitudes will have ____ impact on behaviour because the person is indifferent about the attitude object.
minimal
The extent to which an attitude is internally consistent.
Attitudinal coherence
Logically, the cognitive and emotional aspects of attitudes should be congruent because an emotional evaluation of an object should reflect a cognitive appraisal of its qualities.
That is, we should like things we believe have ____ consequences.
positive
People often have a vested interest in changing others attitudes, whether they are selling products, running for political office or trying to convince a lover to reconcile one more time. ____ refers to deliberate efforts to change in attitude.
Persuasion
Components of persuasion
Aristotle described ____ – the art of persuasive speaking – as a combination of ethos (characteristics of the speaker), pathos (the appeal of the message) and logos (the logic of the argument).
rhetoric
Speakers tend to be more persuasive when they appear credible (expert and trustworthy), attractive, likeable, powerful and similar to the recipient of the message.
SOURCE
The type of appeal and the way it is delivered also effect attitude change.
MESSAGE
The ____ of persuasion is the means by which the message is sent – in words or images, verbally or nonverbally, in person or through media such as telephone or television.
CHANNEL
The ____ in which a message is presented can also influence attitude change. Another method, called attitude inoculation, involves building up the receivers resistance to a persuasive appeal by presenting weak arguments for it or forewarning against it.
CONTEXT
____ characteristics – qualities of the person that the communicator is trying to persuade – also affect the persuasiveness of communication.
RECEIVER
Efforts to induce fear to try to change attitudes – can sometimes be effective but they can backfire if they induce too much fear and lead people to stop attending to the message and instead to focus on managing their anxiety.
Fear appeals
People with ____ attitudes on a topic are obviously less likely candidates for attitude change, and some people are simply more difficult to persuade in general.
strong
The (ELM).
elaboration likelihood model of persuasion
ELM suggests that there are two ____ through which people can be persuaded.
routes
Involves inducing the recipient of a message to think carefully and weigh the arguments.
CENTRAL ROUTE
People who process centrally are highly involved with the issue, tend to be higher in the need for cognition or their need to think about issue relevant arguments and are attentive to the ____ of the arguments that are presented.
quality
Appeals to less rational and thoughtful processes.
PERIPHERAL ROUTE
The peripheral route ____ the cortex and often head straight for points south, such as the limbic system, the heart or the gut.
bypasses
The elaboration likelihood model of persuasion posits that knowing ___ to appeal to people requires figuring out the likelihood that they will think much about the arguments.
how
____ appeals are more likely to change the attitude of a person who both is motivated to think about topic and has time to consider the arguments.
Rational
When elaboration likelihood is high, appeals to ____ are most likely to be persuasive.
logic
Distinction between central and peripheral routes to attitude change ____ the distinction between explicit and implicit judgement and decision-making.
parallels
Another way to influence implicit attitude change is simply to ____ a message enough times that people start to believe it.
repeat
Changing someone’s attitude requires attention to several ____.
variables
If the attitude really ____ to the person,
matters
if the recipient of the message is ____ about the subject,
knowledgeable
if the recipient has time to ____ the arguments
evaluate
and if the attitude was initially generated rationally by ____ ____ and ____, then the best appeal is to the head (central processing).
weighing costs and benefits
If, however, the attitude is not strongly held and is based on minimal knowledge, the best route is usually to the heart to the gut – or, at any rate, as far away from the ____ ____ as possible.
frontal lobes
