Attitudes

Question 1

What is an attitude?

Answer 1

A person’s overall evaluation of a concept.

Question 2

What is an attitude object? How can they vary?

Answer 2

Something attitude is about. (Person, product, issue, event, category, etc.)

• They can vary through different levels of specialty (ex: original yogurt is main category, then can have low-fat, low-sugar, etc)
• Contextualization can vary attitude about the object (ex: don’t usually like rice krispies, but gotta give it a go when it’s got my favourite marvel character on the box)

Question 3

Attitude characterisitics?

Answer 3

Learned over time

Stored in memory

Question 4

How are attitudes categorized?

Answer 4

Direction: positive, negative, ambivalent (equally split, love-hate), indifferent (neither positive or negative)
Strength: strong ones are more accessible in memory, held with confidence, persist over time, resistant to change bc of persuasion attempts
Constructed: dynamic and can be imperfectly stored or retrieved from memory. Context can shift attitude!

Question 5

3 attitude models?

Answer 5

• Tri-component model
• Multi-attribute model
• Theory of reasoned action

Question 6

3 components of tri-component model?

Answer 6

ABCs!
Affect (emotional - feelings)
Behaviour (physical - actions)
Cognition (intellectual - beliefs)

Question 7

Consistency with tri-component model?

Answer 7

Consistent = all 3 components positive toward the object
Inconsistent = not all positive (or negative), leads to cognitive dissonance, which feels bad lol so we want to fix it (ex: eat meat but know shouldn’t, so need change something to fix dissonance - behaviour change = stop eating meat OR intellectual change = believe its okay to eat meat.
** affect (feelings) component most likely to dictate behaviour when inconsistency bc easiest to get from memory and most sticky over time

Question 8

What is self-perception?

Answer 8

When behaviour component comes in first, so you infer the other ones as a result (ex: action = try new snack, so because tried it, you must feel positively toward it and must believe it’s a good snack

** can also have other things develop first and lead to other components later, such as mere exposure effect causes familiarity causes liking, which THEN creates purchase behaviour and beliefs.

Question 9

What is the multi-attribute model?

Answer 9

It says attitudes can be summarized with a weighted average of the importance of certain attributes and our evaluation of them.
ex: cuteness –> 0.2 weight/importance x 8/10 evaluation (it is an 8 out of 10 on the cuteness scale)

Question 10

What is the caveat of multi-attribute model? What does it do well?

Answer 10

Caveat: doesnt get lived experience of attitudes, just perceived/expected
Does well:
- measuring!
- get root of consumer desire
- see discrepancies with the competition
- several options for changing consumer’s attitudes (change product to improve an attribute, change their perception of the object, change their weight to focus more on stronger attribute, add attributes)

Question 11

What is the theory of reasoned action? Explain the parts.

Answer 11

It combines the weighted average concept (multi-attribute model) with subjective norms, which are what others think about a certain behaviour.
These norms depend on normative beliefs, which are what people think you should do * your motivation to comply.
ex: Elon Musk says x product sucks, so depending on how much you value his opinion and expertise, combined with your already existing attitude about the product calculated with the weighted average technique, you can see how positive or negative your attitude is about the product.

Question 12

Caveat to theory of reasoned action?

Answer 12

1. Not always the whole story. 
Also impacted by:
- goals
- needs
- values
- effort
- situational influence
- choice architecture
2. Doesnt account for a component coming first (ex: self perception)
3. Only measures behavioural intentions, not behaviours themselves - studies show that intentions explain 19-38% of variations in behaviour

Question 13

How do you close the intention-action gap?

Answer 13

1) improve how you measure intentions so get better prediction
- get intentions closer in time to the behaviour
- measure as specific as possible
2) make it easy
- make plan for action as concrete as possible
- automate (ex: auto-transfer to savings)
- reminders (ex: alarm to go to gym!)

Question 14

What are explicit and implicit attitudes?

Answer 14

Explicit = consciously think about em, can consciously express them, easily measured
Implicit = outside of conscious awareness, cant articulate

Question 15

How do you discover implicit attitudes?

Answer 15

Implicit association test (IAT)

1. give person concept of interest in categories (A, B)
2. give related words to sort into categories
3. repeat above ^ with a second concept, categories (1, 2), and related words]
4. combine them with one keyboard key for A and 1, other for B and 2
5. measure how quick categorize the words – quicker = more associated

Question 16

What are the pros and cons of IAT?

Answer 16

Cons: controversial, has seemed to reveal implicit racism in those who are explicitly not racist
Pros: can still predict behaviour better than explicit attitudes, shows that diversity training is often inneffective

** just need to consider both implicit and explicit for complex problems, and also remember to account for systematic impacts and biases