Attitudes Flashcards
Allport- attitudes
Attitudes are learned, consistent biases
people who have assumed that attitudes are psychological tendencies/predispositions within the person
Eagly and Chaiken
Study of Chinese couple trying to get into hotels, restaurants
La Pierre; challenged the value of surveys for uncovering attitudes. They visited 252 places, and were refused entry once. In a follow-up survey,92% of these same establishments said they would not serve a Chinese couple.
Theory of Reasoned Action- who?
Fishbein and Ajzen
Theory of Reasoned Action- what?
behavioural intention is formed by:
1) attitude (beliefs)
2) subjective norm (what a person thinks other important people think)
Theory of Planned Behaviour
The Theory of Reasoned Action assumes that the person has control over their behaviour, but in some instances they don’t really, e.g. mother might not be able to produce enough milk for baby; she might find it extremely painful
Study of breastfeeding
Manstead- confirms the predictive potential of the Theory of Reasoned Action.
Take issue with traditional attitude research
Potter and Wetherell
The studies Potter and Wetherell use to critique attitude research (theirs and someone else’s)
Marsh’s study of ‘coloured immigrants’ through Potter and Wetherell’s own study of New Zealanders’ views on Polynesian immigrants
Problems with traditional attitude research: individual-social
- Assumes attitudes are ‘in the head’ separate from the objects of that attitude, and that they are enduring states; Potter and Wetherell argue that attitudes and ‘objects in the world’ are part of the whole social world because people draw on available discourses; the ‘object’ is constructed in talk, it isn’t an objective category
- Attitude research assumes a transparent link between attitudes and reported attitudes, but people might have a vested interest in producing socially acceptable responses, or in affecting the outcomes of the research
Problems with traditional attitude research: agency-structure
Potter and Wetherell argue that attitudes are actively constructed by people in and for a particular context, rather than being already in a person’s head. P and W argue that people take positions on a subject to make arguments, defend positions, blame.
Strategies that P and W argue people use in discourse to justify/perpetuate/create attitudes
Extreme case formulations: ‘if they are just going to come here to use our social security’
Disclaimers: ‘I’m not anti-them, but…’
These strategies can be incoherent, inconsistent and contradictory
Problems with traditional attitude research: power
Neglects to look at how power-relations are created an maintained through language- used to form and perpetuate attitudes
people’s choice of positions is constrained by socially available ways of positioning yourself in regard to…
cultural interpretive repertoires
Eagly and Chaiken
have assumed that attitudes are psychological tendencies/predispositions within the person; they hold the attitude before they encounter the person/situation
Manstead’s study- disadvantage
- gives no ideas about where attitudes come from or why they are contradictory
What’s important about attitudes
How they explain behaviour
How they can be affected by behaviour, e.g. past experience
La Pierre’s conclusion from his research
- questionnaires don’t necessarily reflect actual behaviour / tendency to act
- a good guess at a relevant factor is better than an accurate measure of irrelevancies!
P and W’s 3 methodological issues with Marsh’s traditional attitude research
- loose definitions - ‘coloured immigrants’
- mapping of concepts for measurement onto concepts for analysis- ‘not sympathetic’ becomes ‘hostile’
- assumes attitudes are stable irrespective of individual circumstances
P and W’s 3 points in relation to their own study of NZ’s attitudes to Polynesian immigrants
Context
Variability
Constitution
P and W
Context in talk
Looking at talk in context allows for:
- disclaiming to moderate extreme opinions
- blaming
- normalise contentious opinions by using extreme case formulations
Use of contrast structures and conditionals
P and W
Variability
Discourse contains contradictions - undermines the idea of attitudes as stable
- could be due to different contexts (if A then I think X; if B then I think Y)
- not a problem because what’s important is what people’s purpose is rather than getting a right answer
P and W
Constitution
In traditional attitude research the ‘object’ of an attitude and the attitude itself are thought to be separate.
In discourse analysis, the person actively defines the ‘object of thought’ as they have the conversation- the object of thought is not objective
This lets them shape arguments and put justifications forward as they talk
Problem with Likert scales
Respondents are not using the same object of thought- they each have to imagine (construct) the object of thought before they can score it.
