3. Attitudes Flashcards
Define attitudes as per Allport (1935)
A mental state of readiness that exerts influence on an individual’s response to objects and situations to which it is related
Define attitudes in terms of the cognitive approach (Tourangeau & Rasinski, 1988)
Structure of interrelated beliefs that reside in LTM that are activated when objects or situations that related are encountered
Describe the one component model of attitudes
Affect (evaluation) for or against a psychological object
Describe the two component model of attitudes
Consists of a mental readiness to act, and guides evaluative responses (includes a behavioural aspect)
Describe the 3 component attitude model
Consists of the affective, behavioural and cognitive components (thought, feeling and action)
What is one major flaw with concluding that attitudes have a behavioural aspect?
Behaviour does not always match our attitude
What are the 3 components of attitudes as per Haddock & Zanna (1998)?
Knowledge (cognitive), feeling (affect) and action (behaviour)
Describe instrumentality in terms of attitudes
Means to an end or goal (e.g. through support of certain political parties)
How can an attitude be a form of ego defence?
To protect one’s self esteem we may adopt an uncaring attitude (e.g. if we fail at something)
Describe the socio-cognitive model of attitudes (Pratkanis & Greenwald, 1989)
- Highlights an evaluative component (how we feel)
- Knowledge of an object is represented in memory along with a summary of how to appraise it
- Structured within memory and knowledge which then supports the evaluative component
What are the 4 components of the socio-cognitive model?
- Label for object
- Rules for application
- Evaluative summary
- Supportive knowledge structure
What is the purpose of the label for an object?
To make sense of the world
What is the purpose if the rules for application?
To help to deal with the environment
What is the purpose of the evaluative summary?
Heuristic - a simply strategy for appraisal
What is the purpose of supportive knowledge structure?
Schematic - organises and guides memory for events and actions
Apply the socio-cognitive model to a shark
Label: Shark = really big fish with sharp teeth
Rules: Lives in sea, eats other fish (& sometimes people)
Evaluative summary: frightening, best avoided while swimming
Knowledge structure: A well documented threat to our physical well-being
What are the 5 methods through which we can form an attitude?
- Mere exposure effect
- Classical conditioning
- Instrumental conditioning
- Social learning theory
- Self-perception theory
Describe mere-exposure effect (Zajonc, 1968)
Repeated exposure to an object results in greater attraction to that object (e.g. listening to new music) although this will eventually taper off over timed
Describe classical conditioning (Staats, 1957; Zanna et al., 1970)
Repeated association to a formerly neutral stimulus can elicit a reaction that was previously elicited by another stimulus
Describe instrumental conditioning (Kimble, 1961)
Responses which yield positive outcomes or eliminate negative outcomes are strengthened
Describe observational learning/social learning theory (Bandura, 1973)
Attitude formation is a social learning process. In modelling one person’s behaviour is modelled by another
Describe self-perception (Bem, 1972)
Our attitudes are informed by our behaviour and making internal attributions for that behaviour (we act on behaviours and then upon self-reflection of these behaviours, we form an attitude based on behaviour)
What are the 4 methods for measuring attitudes?
- Thurstone’s scale of equal appearing intervals
- Guttman’s scalogram
- Osgood’s semantic differential
- Likert’s method of summated ratings
Describe Thurstone’s scale of equal appearing intervals
- More than 100 statements ranging from extremely favourable to extremely hostile
- Judges order statements into 11 categories denoting degrees of favourability
- 2 statements selected from each category with the highest inter-judge agreement
- Administer 22 statements of P’s - agree/disagree
- Average sum of agreed statements
Describe Guttman’s scalogram
- Contains either favourable or unfavourable statements arranged in a hierarchy measures a single, unidimensional trait
- Items are ordered from low to high according to difficult so that to approve or correctly answer the last item implies approval of all prior ones
Describe Osgood’s semantic differential
Evaluations of an object/person on a set of semantic scales (e.g. kind/unkind)
Describe Likert’s method of summated ratings
Statements that respondents indicate their strength of agreement/disagreement by using a scale (e.g. strongly agree to strongly disagree)
What are the strengths of likert scales?
Convenience, gives standardised measure, comparable scores, can have range of positive and negative items, gains lots of different aspects
What are the weaknesses of likert scales?
Can force people to agree/disagree with ideas that may not correspond with how they see things, can provide info on the ordering of people’s attitudes on a continuum, but is unable to indicate how close or far apart the different attitude might be, social desirability
What are 2 physiological measures we can take to measure attitudes?
- Skin resistance, heart rate & pupil dilation
2. Event-related brain potentials (ERPs)
Describe the procedure of skin resistance, heart rate & pupil dilation in terms of measuring attitudes
Compare a physiological reading taken in the presence of a neutral object, with one taken in the presence of the attitude object
How do ERPs measure attitudes?
They indicate electrical activity when we respond to different stimuli
What are issues with using ERPs to measure attitudes?
We could falsely attribute physiological changes to attitudes even when they might be truthful, also is difficult to tell if changes are as a result of a positive or negative attitude
Describe the implicit association test
People respond much quicker when their ethnic group is paired with a positive word than when another ethnic group is paired with the same positive word
What are the issues with implicit association tests
Administration is quite difficult and not very convenient
Outline the consistency theories of attitudes
- Attitudes change to be consistent with each other
- Attitudes change to be consistent with behaviour
- Humans tend to like being consistent in their beliefs and behaviours and therefore when attitudes are inconsistent this can lead to cognitive dissonance which then leads to changes to provide consistency
Describe Cognitive Dissonance (Festinger, 1957)
If a cognition is in direct conflict with another one, and the two are related, we experience tension, we therefore deal with this tension by either changing one of the cognitions or adding an extra one to ‘explain’ the discrepancy
What are the ways in which dissonance can be initiated?
Forced compliance, decision-making and effort
Describe Festinger & Carlsmith’s (1959) experiment of forced compliant behaviour
- Boring task for 1 hour (so they had a negative attitude)
- Then they were asked to let the next P know that the task was interesting & worthwhile
- Paid either $1 (no incentive) or $20 (incentive)
- P’s who were paid $20 didn’t change their attitude as they were only doing it for the money
- P’s who were paid $1 went through dissonance so changed their beliefs about the task
Describe Brehm’s (1956) study of decision making
- P’s asked to rate 8 products
- P’s offered choice of payment between either 2 highly desirable products (high dissonance) or 1 highly and 1 lowly desired (low dissonance)
- P’s then asked to rate the product again
- P’s rated their chosen item more highly than before and the discarded one lower than before to reduce dissonance
Describe the effort justification paradigm
- ‘I suffered for it, so I like it!’
- The more effort we put into something the more we like it at the end
Describe Bem’s 1973 theory of self-perception in terms of attitudes
- Attitudes informed by behaviour (we match attitudes to our behaviours)
- We make inferences about our own attitudes, based on behaviour, I the same way we make inferences about the attitudes of others
Describe The Yale Attitude Change Approach (Hovland et al., 1953)
According to this approach, attitude change/persuasion is influenced by 3 factors:
- The source: originator of communication
- The message: features of the communication itself
- The audience: characteristics of who is receiving the message
Describe factors that influence attitude change in terms of the source
Credibility - expertise/trustworthiness
Appearance - attractiveness, similarity
Outline features of the message that can impact attitude change
1 v 2 sided
Repetition
Fear arousal
Describe features of the audience that can influence attitude change
- Distraction (if you are distracted you are less likely to agree with it)
- Self esteem (high self esteem likely to reject the message due to strong sense of identity)
- Age - high susceptibility in early adulthood and later life but lower in middle adulthood
If P’s are more active in participation, they are more likely to ____
Make changes in their attitudes
Describe La Piere’s (1934) research into whether attitudes can predict behaviour
- Difference between prejudiced attitudes & discriminatory behaviour
- Mixed-race group of diners
- 249/250 allowed the group in
- 90% of replies indicated that they would decline the booking
When do attitudes predict behaviour (list 5 instances)?
- Correspondence between attitude & behavioural measure
- Depends on the domain of behaviour (effort)
- Strength of attitude
- Role of individual differences (self monitoring)
- Age
Outline the theory of reasoned action (Fishbein & Ajzen, 1974)
- When people deliberately attempt to make their behaviour consistent with their attitudes, they form intentions (behavioural intention)
- Subjective norms (other people’s beliefs about the behaviour) (motivation to comply)
- Attitudes towards the behaviour (beliefs about the behaviour, how the beliefs are evaluated)
Outline the theory of planned behaviour
- Elaborates on the TRA by including a control component
- Perceived behavioural control can act either on the behavioural intention or directly on the behaviour itself
- PBC improves the production of accuracy for both intention and actions
What is perceived behavioural control?
The extent to which the person believes it is easy or difficult to perform an act
