Attitudes

Question 1

What is an attitude according to Ajzen & Fishbein (1980)?

Answer 1

A person’s general feeling of favorableness or unfavorableness toward a concept.

Question 2

What are attitudes according to Petty & Cacioppo, 1981?

Answer 2

A general and enduring positive or negative feeling about some person, object or issue

Question 3

What are the three components of attitudes?

Answer 3

Affect (feelings), behavior (actions), and cognition (beliefs).

Question 4

Where do attitudes come from?

Answer 4

Experience, social roles and norms, classical and operant conditioning, and observing others.

Question 5

How are explicit attitudes measured?

Answer 5

By directly asking participants about their attitudes (e.g., surveys).

Question 6

What are implicit measures of attitudes?

Answer 6

Methods that infer attitudes indirectly, such as the Implicit Association Test.

Question 7

Why might explicit and implicit attitudes differ?

Answer 7

Because individuals may be unwilling or unable to report their true attitudes, especially on sensitive topics.

Question 8

What factors improve the accuracy of predicting behavior from attitudes?

Answer 8

Strong, long-held attitudes, minimized social influences, specific attitude measures, and matching the type of measure to the behavior.

Question 9

What did Norman (2011) find about attitudes predicting binge drinking?

Answer 9

Attitudes predicted 75% of variance in intentions and 35% of variance in behavior.

Question 10

When are explicit vs. implicit measures better predictors?

Answer 10

Explicit measures predict deliberate behaviors; implicit measures predict automatic behaviors.

Question 11

What are subjective norms in the TRA?

Answer 11

Perceptions of social pressures or the views of important others about a behavior.

Question 12

What is perceived behavioral control in the TPB?

Answer 12

Beliefs about how easy or difficult it is to perform a behavior.

Question 13

What did the TPB study on binge drinking find?

Answer 13

Attitude and self-efficacy predicted intentions, while intentions and habits predicted behaviors.

Question 14

What percentage of variability in behavior did the TPB explain in a meta-analysis of health behaviors (McEachan et al., 2011)?

Answer 14

19.3%.

Question 15

What are the limitations of the TPB?

Answer 15

It better predicts deliberate behaviors than habitual ones and is more useful for prediction than behavior change.

Question 16

What is the intention-behavior gap?

Answer 16

Strong intentions translate into behavior only about half the time.

Question 17

What factors contribute to the intention-behavior gap?

Answer 17

Forgetting to act, not knowing how to act, or encountering obstacles.

Question 18

What are injunctive norms?

Answer 18

Perceptions of what should or ought to be done.

Question 19

What are descriptive norms?

Answer 19

Perceptions of whether others are performing a behavior.

Question 20

Why are perceptions of norms often inaccurate?

Answer 20

Social media overrepresents extreme opinions, distorting true social norms.

Question 21

What is cognitive consistency?

Answer 21

The tendency for beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors to align in harmony.

Question 22

What is cognitive dissonance?

Answer 22

Emotional discomfort from inconsistencies between attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors.

Question 23

How do people reduce cognitive dissonance?

Answer 23

By changing attitudes or behaviors, adding new information, or reducing the importance of inconsistencies.

Question 24

What did Festinger & Carlsmith (1959) find about cognitive dissonance?

Answer 24

Participants paid $1 to lie rated a boring task as more enjoyable than those paid $20, due to insufficient external justification.

Question 25

When is dissonance more powerful?

Answer 25

When beliefs are important, decisions have significant consequences, or self-image is threatened.

Question 26

What are strategies to reduce dissonance without changing attitudes or behaviors?

Answer 26

Adding new information, reducing the importance of conflicting cognitions, or denying responsibility.

Question 27

What is confirmation bias?

Answer 27

The tendency to seek information that confirms existing beliefs and ignore contradictory evidence.

Question 28

How did students in Wombacher et al. (2019) reduce dissonance about blackout drinking?

Answer 28

By adding new cognitions, such as “other students do this more than I do” or “it’s out of my control.”