Attitudes Flashcards
What is attitude?
A relatively enduring set of beliefs, feelings and intentions toward an object, person, event or symbol (attitude object)
What are the three components of an attitude?
- Cognitive component: beliefs
- Affective component: feelings
- Behavioural component: intentions
What did Berkowitz and Knurek’s (1969) study involve and what can it be applied?
- Participants were conditioned to dislike the names Ed or George by pairing them with negative adjectives (US)
- Participants were friendlier to a confederate with a neutral name compared to a confederate called Ed/George
- This shows how classical conditioning plays a part in attitude formation
How are attitudes formed?
- Classical conditioning
2. Mere exposure effect
What did Wicker (1969) find?
On average, attitudes predict only 2 - 3% of behaviour
What did the Roper Organisation (1990) report?
92% of Americans believe that pollution is a moderate or very serious threat, yet fewer than 50% do anything beyond recycling bottles or cans
What is the principle of aggregation?
The effects of our attitudes become more apparent when we look at a person’s behaviour as a whole, compared to isolated behaviours
What can the relation between attitudes and behaviour be described as?
Bidirectional
What did Janis and Mann (1965) find in their study when participants either role-played a difficult patient in the experimental condition, or listened to a doctor only in the control group? 🚬
Those in the experimental condition had more negative attitudes towards smoking and were more likely to stop smoking
What is the cognitive dissonance theory (Festinger)?
- Advocating an attitude different from your private attitude creates dissonance
- Dissonance between public and private attitude
- Private attitude is changed to resolve dissonance
What is the self-perception theory (Bem, 1965)?
People infer their own attitudes from their behaviour (attributional explanation)
What did Hovland and Weiss (1951) find?
People developed a more favourable attitude towards different types of medicine when it appeared in a prestigious medical journal than in a tabloid, showing how the credibility of a source can change attitude
What did Chaiken (1979) find?
Physically attractive people are more likely than physically unattractive to persuade others to sign a petition, showing how a message can have more impact at changing attitudes if the source is physically attractive
