Attitude

Question 1

What is an attitude?

Answer 1

• a psychological tendency that is expressed by evaluating a particular entity with some degree of favor or disfavor. (Eagly & Chaiken 1993)

Question 2

What is the 3 component view of attitudes?

Answer 2

• an approach focused on intra-attitudinal consistency (Rosenberg et al 1960)
• attitudes made up of 3 elements
  1) belief about object (cognitive) e.g. donating blood is important
  2) feelings towards an object (affective) e.g. fear of needles
  3) action tendencies towards an object (behavioral) e.g. donated blood before or not

Question 3

What are some examples of measurable independent variables when looking at attitudes?

Answer 3

• Stimuli

- e.g., individuals, situations, social issues, social groups

Question 4

What are some examples of measurable dependent variables when looking at attitudes?

Answer 4

• (emotions)sympathetic nervous responses, verbal statements of affect
• (cognition)perceptual response, verbal statements of belief
• (behavior)overt actions , verbal statements concerning behavior

Question 5

What are some ways to measure attitudes?

Answer 5

• Self report
• implicit measure
• physiological measures
• non-reactive measures

Question 6

What are some issues with self report measures?

Answer 6

• susceptible to misrepresentation > people may misrepresent their attitude (e.g. for the sake of social desirability)
• ‘reactive’ responding > sometimes people are neutral in their attitudes yet when asked they provide a spontaneous view which is unstable and a poor predictor of behavior

Question 7

How did (Davido et al 1986) investigate non self report measures of attitudes?

Answer 7

• primed ppts to black and white stimuli and charted reaction times to positive and negative traits following black and white primes
• for the white prime people were quicker to say yes to positive traits and no to negative traits

Question 8

What are some physiological measures used when recording attitudes?

Answer 8

• GSR > Galvanic skin response
• EMG > Electromyogram
• amygdala activation

Question 9

What are some issues with physiological measures?

Answer 9

GSR > assess the intensity of emotional response not their direction > measures arousal so fear and anger could look identical and can’t be differentiated
EMG/Amygdala activation > insensitivity to quality of attitudinal response, time and cost issues, impractical outside lab so low external validity

Question 10

What is method triangulation?

Answer 10

-use of multiple methods/measures to study a given issue - find converging evidence of social effect -strengths of one method would compensate for the weakness of another

Question 11

What is programmatic researh (Aronson et al 1998)

Answer 11

multiple methods (lab +field)
-all experiments conducted in a variety of setting
hypothesis tested in both laboratory and field conditions
logical step by step , experiments build on each other
aims for internal and external validity