Attitudes

Question 1

What is attitude?

Answer 1

A relatively enduring set of beliefs, feelings and intentions toward an object, person, event or symbol (attitude object)

Question 2

What are the three components of an attitude?

Answer 2

1. Cognitive component: beliefs
2. Affective component: feelings
3. Behavioural component: intentions

Question 3

What did Berkowitz and Knurek’s (1969) study involve and what can it be applied?

Answer 3

• 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

Question 4

How are attitudes formed?

Answer 4

1. Classical conditioning

2. Mere exposure effect

Question 5

What did Wicker (1969) find?

Answer 5

On average, attitudes predict only 2 - 3% of behaviour

Question 6

What did the Roper Organisation (1990) report?

Answer 6

92% of Americans believe that pollution is a moderate or very serious threat, yet fewer than 50% do anything beyond recycling bottles or cans

Question 7

What is the principle of aggregation?

Answer 7

The effects of our attitudes become more apparent when we look at a person’s behaviour as a whole, compared to isolated behaviours

Question 8

What can the relation between attitudes and behaviour be described as?

Answer 8

Bidirectional

Question 9

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? 🚬

Answer 9

Those in the experimental condition had more negative attitudes towards smoking and were more likely to stop smoking

Question 10

What is the cognitive dissonance theory (Festinger)?

Answer 10

• Advocating an attitude different from your private attitude creates dissonance
• Dissonance between public and private attitude
• Private attitude is changed to resolve dissonance

Question 11

What is the self-perception theory (Bem, 1965)?

Answer 11

People infer their own attitudes from their behaviour (attributional explanation)

Question 12

What did Hovland and Weiss (1951) find?

Answer 12

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

Question 13

What did Chaiken (1979) find?

Answer 13

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