Attitudes Flashcards
What is an attitude according to Ajzen & Fishbein (1980)?
A person’s general feeling of favorableness or unfavorableness toward a concept.
What are attitudes according to Petty & Cacioppo, 1981?
A general and enduring positive or negative feeling about some person, object or issue
What are the three components of attitudes?
Affect (feelings), behavior (actions), and cognition (beliefs).
Where do attitudes come from?
Experience, social roles and norms, classical and operant conditioning, and observing others.
How are explicit attitudes measured?
By directly asking participants about their attitudes (e.g., surveys).
What are implicit measures of attitudes?
Methods that infer attitudes indirectly, such as the Implicit Association Test.
Why might explicit and implicit attitudes differ?
Because individuals may be unwilling or unable to report their true attitudes, especially on sensitive topics.
What factors improve the accuracy of predicting behavior from attitudes?
Strong, long-held attitudes, minimized social influences, specific attitude measures, and matching the type of measure to the behavior.
What did Norman (2011) find about attitudes predicting binge drinking?
Attitudes predicted 75% of variance in intentions and 35% of variance in behavior.
When are explicit vs. implicit measures better predictors?
Explicit measures predict deliberate behaviors; implicit measures predict automatic behaviors.
What are subjective norms in the TRA?
Perceptions of social pressures or the views of important others about a behavior.
What is perceived behavioral control in the TPB?
Beliefs about how easy or difficult it is to perform a behavior.
What did the TPB study on binge drinking find?
Attitude and self-efficacy predicted intentions, while intentions and habits predicted behaviors.
What percentage of variability in behavior did the TPB explain in a meta-analysis of health behaviors (McEachan et al., 2011)?
19.3%.
What are the limitations of the TPB?
It better predicts deliberate behaviors than habitual ones and is more useful for prediction than behavior change.
What is the intention-behavior gap?
Strong intentions translate into behavior only about half the time.
What factors contribute to the intention-behavior gap?
Forgetting to act, not knowing how to act, or encountering obstacles.
What are injunctive norms?
Perceptions of what should or ought to be done.
What are descriptive norms?
Perceptions of whether others are performing a behavior.
Why are perceptions of norms often inaccurate?
Social media overrepresents extreme opinions, distorting true social norms.
What is cognitive consistency?
The tendency for beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors to align in harmony.
What is cognitive dissonance?
Emotional discomfort from inconsistencies between attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors.
How do people reduce cognitive dissonance?
By changing attitudes or behaviors, adding new information, or reducing the importance of inconsistencies.
What did Festinger & Carlsmith (1959) find about cognitive dissonance?
Participants paid $1 to lie rated a boring task as more enjoyable than those paid $20, due to insufficient external justification.
When is dissonance more powerful?
When beliefs are important, decisions have significant consequences, or self-image is threatened.
What are strategies to reduce dissonance without changing attitudes or behaviors?
Adding new information, reducing the importance of conflicting cognitions, or denying responsibility.
What is confirmation bias?
The tendency to seek information that confirms existing beliefs and ignore contradictory evidence.
How did students in Wombacher et al. (2019) reduce dissonance about blackout drinking?
By adding new cognitions, such as “other students do this more than I do” or “it’s out of my control.”
