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Attitudes Flashcards

1
Q

What is an attitude

Thurnstone 1931

A

“The affect for or against a psychological object”

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2
Q

What is an attitude
Fazio, 1989
Pratkanis and Greenwald, 1989

A

•associations between attitude objects and evaluations of these objects

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3
Q

Component theories of attitude

A

Unitary model
Affective Evaluation
Thurstone 1931

Dual Model
Mental readiness
Guide evaluative responses
Allport 1935

Tripartite model
Affect
Behaviour
Cognition

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4
Q

Tripartite Model

Attitude object: Beer

A

Cognitive
Belief bases e.g. Beer helps me to relax

Affective
Emotion based e.g. I enjoy drinking beer

Behavioural
Intention based e.g. I plan to drink more beer after work

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5
Q

Attitude formation: cognitive theories

A
  • Information integration theory
  • formed by ‘averaging’ available information on object
  • Mood-as-information hypothesis
  • Emotion (mood) provides basis of evaluation of objects
  • Heuristic / Associative processing
  • decision ‘rules of thumb’ are used to make judgements and form ‘mental shortcuts’ in memory
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6
Q

Attitude formation

Self perception theory

A

•infer attitudes from own behaviour (Bem, 1960)

e.g.Heterosexual anxiety
(Haemmerlie & Montgomery, 1982,1984)

“We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.“ ~ Kurt Vonnegut (Mother Night)

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7
Q

Sources of attitude formation

A
  • Parents
  • Infer attitudes from those most closest to you
  • strength of association ranges from strong (Jennings & Niemi, 1968) for broad issues e.g. politics, religion
  • to very weak (Connell, 1972) for specific attitudes
  • Mass media
  • Particularly television an important influence of attitude formation especially in children
  • links between television advertisements and children’s attitude (Atkin, 1980)
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8
Q

What are attitudes for

A

Attitudes serve as conscious and unconscious motives and have different functions (Katz, 1960):

  • KNOWLEDGE FUNCTION:
  • assist making sense of the world and to organize the information we encounter (c.f. cognitive economy)
  • UTILITARIAN FUNCTION:
  • help us behave in socially acceptable ways to gain positive and avoid negative outcomes
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9
Q

VALUE EXPRESSIVE FUNCTION:

A

Express personally held values and self-identity

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10
Q

EGO-DEFENSIVE FUNCTION:

A

•allow use to preserve a positive sense of self

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11
Q

Katz’s (1960) categories still widely used

A
  • More or less useful depending on field, some may not be relevant
  • May be able to identify further functions
  • Measurement difficulties
  • People may lack insight into functions
  • Demand characteristics in responding

• Useful in designing persuasive communications

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12
Q

Measuring attitudes

A
  • Attitude scales
  • Likert scale
  • Semantic differential
  • Physiological measures
  • Unobtrusive measures of behaviour
  • Implicit measures of attitudes
  • Attitude priming
  • Implicit association test
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13
Q

Likert-Scale Item

A

`I believe that nuclear power plants are one of the great dangers of industrial societies´

           \+2        Strongly agree
           \+1        Moderately agree
            0        Neutral or undecided
           -1        Moderately disagree
           -2        Strongly disagree
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14
Q

A ‘Likert-Type’ Self-Rating Scale

A
  • Acquiescent response set – tendency to agree with items

* Mix positively and negatively phrased items to counteract problem

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15
Q

Semantic Differential Scale

A

Osgood, Suci and Tannenbaum, 1957

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16
Q

Physiological measures

A

•E.g. Skin resistance, heart rate, pupil dilation
•Polygraph
➢People less able to alter responses
➢But only measures intensity
➢But can be influenced by other things
•Development of social neuroscience methods

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17
Q

Implicit measures

A
  • Based on activation of accessible categories in memory
  • Less easy for participants to influence their responses
  • Not always reliable
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18
Q

Attitude accessibility model

Fazio 1989

A
  • Attitudes that have a strong link are highly accessible
  • Attitudes are most influential when they are relevant and important
  • Attitudes can be accessible from recent activation
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19
Q

Effort justification

A

Aronson and Mills 1959

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20
Q

Induced cognitive dissonance

A

Festinger and carlsmith 1959

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21
Q

Cognitive dissonance theory

A

•Premise 1: If a person behaves OR is presented with information that is counter attitudinal an internal conflict arises – ‘dissonance’
•Premise 2: Dissonance motivates people to make alterations to their behavioural or internal states to restore equilibrium
•Premise 3: Dissonance can be attenuated (reduced) using 3 means
1.reducing the importance of one of the dissonant elements (attitude change)
2.adding a ‘consonant’ element (cognitive re-appraisal)
3.changing one of the dissonant elements (behaviour)

22
Q

Cognitive dissonance theory

A
  • Behaviour driving change in attitudes
  • Festinger (1954) - how attitudes, behaviour and self-esteem (self-image) are linked
  • Cognitive dissonance – unpleasant state of psychological tension when inconsistency occurs
  • Any inconsistency may motivate change
  • Part of family of balance theory models – people try to be consistent in thought and action
23
Q

Dual process models of persuasion

A
  • Petty and Wegener (1998) suggest a ‘sufficiency threshold’ – as long as heuristics produce an attitude that we are confident with
  • if not, systematic processing may be used
  • Use of systematic processing also halted by:
  • Mood – people in good moods tend to use heuristics (Gorn, 1982; Bohner et al., 1994)
  • Emotion – high-fear messages tend to be processed peripherally while low-fear more centrally
24
Q

Dual process models of persuasion Heuristic – systematic model - Chaiken (1987):

A
  • Systematic processing - careful, deliberative scanning and processing of available information
  • Heuristic processing - people use ‘cognitive heuristics’ or ‘shortcuts’ to make judgements
  • ‘longer arguments are always convincing’
  • ‘statistics don’t lie’
  • ‘you can’t trust a lawyer’
  • ‘he looks knowledgeable’
25
Q

Dual process models of persuasion

A

Elaboration Likelihood Model - Petty & Cacioppo (1986)
•Two ‘routes’ to persuasion
•Central route = when message is followed closely, considerable cognitive effort expended
•Peripheral route = Superficial processing of peripheral cues, attraction rather than information

26
Q

Elaboration likelihood model

A

Petty and Cacioppo 1986

27
Q

The audience - gender

A
  • Women more easily persuaded than men (Cooper, 1979)
  • Socialisation into cooperative roles (Eagly et al., 1981)
  • Women less familiar with male orientated topics?
  • Meta-analysis indicates that across studies and topics, women more easily persuaded (Eagly and Carli, 1981)
  • May be due to predominance of male researchers
  • Carli (1990) men in particular resist influence by women – especially when communication has a highly competent, powerful style
  • Women more persuasive in traditional ‘female’ domains
  • Tempered when women also display warmth and communality
28
Q

The audience - self esteem

A

People with low self-esteem were more susceptible to persuasion and attitude change (Hovland et al.)
•McGuire (1968) suggested that this also followed an inverted-U relationship
•Low self esteem – less attentive, more anxious
•High self esteem – less susceptible to influence, more self assured

29
Q

The medium of the message

A

Eagly and Chaiken (1983

30
Q

Outcome framing

Gains or losses

A
  • Health psychology suggests that focusing on gains or losses is differentially useful for different behaviour
  • Focusing on gains – useful for behaviours perceived as low in risk
  • Often preventative behaviours, e.g. applying sunscreen
  • Mitigating climate change fits here
  • Focusing on losses – useful for behaviours perceived as higher in risk
  • Sometimes detection behaviours, e.g. cancer screening, (short term risk of detecting negative outcome) – but evidence mixed here
31
Q

Communicating climate change
Fear
Spence et al 2010

A
  • Messages that provoked fear
  • Were more memorable
  • Increased perceived severity of the problem
  • Overall messages that focused on positives
  • Increased positive attitudes towards climate change mitigation
32
Q

Communicating climate change- fear

Spence et al 2010

A

•Gain
‘Mitigating climate change will help to protect Europe’s natural systems and biodiversity.’

‘Lessening climate change will help to stop levels of water stress increasing over central and southern Europe.’

•Loss
‘Without mitigating climate change, Europe’s natural systems and biodiversity will be threatened.’

‘Without mitigating climate change, potential levels of water stress will increase over central and southern Europe.’

33
Q

A meta analysis of fear appeals

A

Witte & Allen (2000) meta-analysis:
•strong fear appeals produce high levels of perceived severity and susceptibility, and are most persuasive
•fear can motivate adaptive actions e.g. message acceptance and maladaptive actions e.g. defensive avoidance
•strong fear appeals and high-efficacy messages produce the greatest behavior change
•whereas strong fear appeals with low-efficacy messages produce the greatest levels of defensive responses
•Ignore message, discredit source

34
Q

Does fear work

A

•Early research suggested low-fear was optimal (e.g., dental hygiene; Janis & Feshbach, 1953)
•Leventhal et al. (1967) found high-fear message promoted greater willingness to stop smoking
•McGuire (1969) suggested an ‘inverted-U’ hypothesis
•Messages with too little fear may not highlight the potential harm of the targeted act
•Very disturbing images may distract people from the message itself or may evoke an ‘avoidance’ reaction (Keller & Block, 1995)
McGuire’s (1969) ‘Inverted-U’ hypothesis

35
Q

THe message

A
  • Persuasion is more effective if the message is not thought to be trying to influence
  • Repetition increases familiarity, belief and liking
  • Persuasion is enhanced if arguments match the audiences current attitude functions.
  • Can persuasion be enhanced using messages that arouse fear in the audience?
36
Q

Source credibility

Bochner and Insko 1996

A

Hours of sleep advocated by source

Discrepancy from model student opinion

37
Q

The source or communicator

A

•Experts more persuasive (and credible) than non-experts (Hovland & Weiss, 1952)
•Popular and attractive communicators
are most effective (Kiesler & Kiesler, 1969)
•People speaking more quickly are more
effective than slow speakers (Miller et al.,
1976), conveys expertise in subject matter

38
Q

Persuasive communication

A
  • The ‘Yale’ approach precursor and highly influential in persuasive communication
  • Carl Hovland and coworkers identified the features of persuasive communication
  • Source or communicator
  • Message (content)
  • Audience

➢WHO says WHAT to WHOM and with what effect?

39
Q

Attitude measures and behaviour

A

Fazio’s (1990) MODE (Motivation and Opportunity as DEterminants of processing) model
e.g. Dovidio et al (1997) – racial attitudes

40
Q

Perceived behavioural control

A

Madden, Ellen & Ajzen,1992

41
Q

The theory of planned behaviour

A

Ajzen 1989

42
Q

Action

A

Ajzen and Fishbein 1980

Behavioural beliefs X value of belief = attitudes = intentions = behaviour

Normative beliefs X motivation to comply = subjective norms = intentions = behaviour

43
Q

Expectancy value model of attitudes

A
  • Fishbein (1967) attitudes alone will not predict behaviour
  • Interaction between beliefs, values, attitudes and intentions important
  • Belief: Behaviour will result in a certain outcome
  • (e.g., studying hard will gain me good grades)
  • Value: Outcome is highly valued
  • (e.g., getting good grades is important to me)
  • Each belief is multiplied by each value to produce attitude ‘score’
44
Q

Attitude behaviour relationships

Methodological reasons

A
  • Unreliability and low validity of attitude and/or behavioural measures
  • Time between attitude and behavioural measure
45
Q

Attitude behaviour relationship

Other variables

A
  • Lack of compatibility/correspondence between attitude and behaviour – generality of attitude measure
  • Target, Action, Context and Time
  • Strong indirect attitude-behaviour relationships, e.g. through intentions
46
Q

Attitude behaviour relationship

•Utility of attitudes dependent on prediction of behaviour

A
  • LaPiere (1934) classic study: hoteliers and restauranteur’s attitudes towards Asians in 1930’s USA
  • Wicker (1969) meta-analysis: attitudes weakly correlated with behaviour across 45 studies (r =.15)
  • Gregson and Stacey (1981) only a small positive correlation between attitudes and alcohol consumption
47
Q

Fazio s automatic activation model

A

Presentation of attitude object
Attitude object in memory
Evaluation of attitude object
Information processing and behaviour

48
Q

What is an attitude?

Allport

A

Attitudes are a mental and neural state of readiness, organised through experience, exerting a directive or dynamic influence upon the individual’s response to all objects and situations with which it is related

49
Q

•an attitude is represented in memory by (3)

Pratkanis and Greenwald, 1989

A
  • 1) an object label and rules for applying that label
  • 2) an evaluative summary of that object
  • 3) a knowledge structure supporting that evaluation
50
Q

An example of a unitary model

A

Affective Evaluation

Thurstone 1931

51
Q

Dual models of attitude

A

Mental readiness
Guide evaluative responses
Allport 1935

52
Q

What is a tripartite model of an attitude

A

Tripartite model
Affect
Behaviour
Cognition

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