attitudes Flashcards
what is an attitude?
association between an attitude object and evaluations of these objects
what are four behavioural theories of attitudes?
mere exposure, classical conditioning, instrumental conditioning, observational learning
how can we develop attitudes by mere exposure?
familiarity leads to contempt
how can classical conditioning lead to attitudes?
neutral stimuli is paired with positive and negative stimuli
how can operant conditioning lead to attitudes?
reinforcement system using rewards and punishments
how can observational learning lead to the behavioural theories of attitudes?
through modelling and vicarious reinforcement
what are three cognitive theories of attitudes?
information integration theory
mood as information hypothesis
heuristic/associative processing
how can information integration theory lead to an attitude?
look at the average information about an object
how can the mood as information hypothesis explain attitude development?
emotion allows us to evaluate objects- we associate moods with a situation
how can heuristic/associative processing explain attitudes?
‘rules of thumb’ are used to make judgements and form mental shortcuts in memory
how does self perception theory explain attitude formation?
we infer attitudes from our own behaviour
what happened when Haemmerlie and Montgomery looked at self perception theory? (1982)
looked at heterosexual anxiety
participant was nervous before interaction
person of the opposite sex told to interact very positively
only rated the experience as going well if the person of the opposite sex was very positive
suggests we infer a lot from our own behaviour
what are two main sources of attitude formation?
parents and the media
how can we measure attitudes?
implicitly and explicitly
what are the advantages of measuring attitudes explicitly?
measured directly
good constructive validity
predicts deliberate behaviours
what are the advantages of measuring attitudes implicitly?
difficult to fake
measured indirectly
predicts automatic problems
what happened in Fazio’s study of evaluative priming?
participants had to categorise target words as fast as they could
preceded by a positive/negative prime
positive words with positive primes were better remembered and categorised faster
how does evaluative priming relate to attitude formation?
if people are repeatedly exposed to positive/negative primes, they may subsequently develop more positive/negative attitudes towards related concepts after
what are the two accounts which can be used to explain the implicit association task?
spreading activation account
response conflict account
what is the spreading activation account?
get priming stimulus
activation of prime spreads to other stimuli
prime was related to positive things
secondary prime ‘chocolate’ was presented, but was already partially activated
what is the response conflict account?
get priming stimulus
produces response
target stimulus is incongruent with the prime
slows response rate
what did Greenwald, Poehlman, Uhlmann and Banaji (2009) find out in a meta analysis of predictive validity for implicit/explicit measures of attitude?
implicit measures averaged r=0.27 and explicit measures averaged r=0.36
so both valuable for predicting behaviour
implicit measures can be considered more affective as they correlate best with the cognitive attitude component
what is the single attitude model?
joint function of deliberative and spontaneous processes
explicit and implicit are different ways of measuring the same thing
what is the dual attitude model?
can hold two or more attitudes towards the same thing at the same time
the attitude endorsed depends on the situation
