Attitudes

Question 1

What are attitudes?

Answer 1

A mental state of readiness that exerts influence on an individual’s response to objects and situations to which it is related (Allport, 1935)

▪ A relatively enduring set of beliefs, feelings and intentions towards an object, person, event or symbol (Eagly & Chaiken, 1993; Pratkanis et al., 1989)

▪ Structure of interrelated beliefs that reside in long-term memory (LTM) that are activated when objects or situations that related are encountered (Tourangeau & Rasinski, 1988)

▪ Experiences that involve an evaluation of someone or something (Eiser, 1980).

Question 2

What are the componats of an attitude?

Answer 2

One component: affect (evaluation) for or against a psychological object (Thurstone, 1931)

▪ Two components: consists of a mental readiness to act, and guides evaluative responses (Allport, 1935)

▪ Three components: consist of the affective, behavioural and cognitive components (thought, feeling, and action)

Question 3

What are the function of attitudes accroding to Katz (1960)

Answer 3

▪ Katz (1960)

➢ Knowledge (provide meaningful, structured environment)

➢ Instrumentality (means to an end or goal)

➢ Ego defence (protecting one’s self-esteem)

➢ Value expressiveness (allowing people to display those values that uniquely identify and define them)

Question 4

explain the socio-cognitive model of attitudes

Answer 4

Highlights an evaluative component

▪ Knowledge of an object is represented in memory along with a summary of how to appraise that object ▪ Attitude: “a person’s evaluation of an object or thought”

Label of an object,rules of application –>makes sense of the world , help to deal with the environment

evaluative summery –> Heuristic- a simple strategy for appraisal

supportive knowledgestructure –> schematic-organsies and guides memory for events and actions

e.g. label: shark, big fish with teeth
rules: lives in sea
evaluative summery: frightening, best avoided if swimming
knowledge structure: a well documented threat to our physical well-being ( both in science and fiction.)

Question 5

How do attitudes form according to socialisation?

Answer 5

Attitudes are learned rather than innate: socialisation process (Fishbein & Ajzen, 1975)
▪ Direct experience (positive or negative) e.g. less exposure = more discrimination
➢ Mere exposure effect
➢ Classical conditioning
➢ Instrumental conditioning
➢ Social Learning Theory
➢ Self-perception Theory

Question 6

Explain the mere exposure effect

Answer 6

Mere-exposure effect (Zajonc, 1968): repeated exposure to an object results in greater attraction to that object

Question 7

Explain the classical condition explanation to attitude formation

Answer 7

Classical Conditioning (Staats, 1957; Zanna et al., 1970): repeated association of a formerly neutral stimulus can elicit a reaction that was previously elicited by another stimulus

Question 8

explain the instrumental conditioning to attitude formation

Answer 8

Instrumental Conditioning (Kimble, 1961): responses which yield positive outcomes or eliminate negative outcomes are strengthened

Question 9

explain social learning theory explaantion to attitude formation

Answer 9

Observational learning (Bandura, 1973): Attitude formation is a social learning process. In modelling, one person’s behaviour is modelled by another

Question 10

explain self-perception theory as an explaantion for attitude formation

Answer 10

Self-perception (Bem, 1972): our attitudes are informed byour behaviour and making internal attributions for that behaviour

▪ “Why did I do that?”

Question 11

How are attitudes measured?

Answer 11

Thurstone’s scale of equal appearing intervals

▪ Guttman’s scalagram (uni-dimensional)

▪ Osgood’s semantic differential (meaning given to a word)

▪ Likert’s method of summated ratings

Question 12

Explain Thrstone’s methods of equal appearing intervals

Answer 12

Thurstone’s scale

▪ More than 100 statements ranging from extremely favourable to extremely hostile

• e.g., statements that describe attitudes towards war
• “I would refuse to participate in any way in war”
• “I would immediately go to war and would do everything in my power to influence others to do the same”
• “I would support my country even against my convictions”
• “I would not go to war, unless I was drafted”

Judges order statements and put them into 11 categories (1 being least favourable to 11 being most)
2 statements selected from each category wit hthe highest inter-rater realiability
administer 22 statements to ppts with agree/disagree format
average the sum of agreed statements

Question 13

explain guttmans scale

Answer 13

contains either favourable or unfavourable statements arranged in a ahierarchy - measures single, unidimensional trait
Intems are ordered high t olow accordingly so in order to agree with a statemnet at the bottom, all prior ones have to be agreed with.

Question 14

Osgood’s semantic differential

Answer 14

Doesn’t measure opinions but evaluations of an object/person on a set of semnatic scales

Question 15

Likert scales

Answer 15

scales that measure a persons agreement/disagreement with something

Question 16

give some strengths to likert scales

Answer 16

▪ Strengths

▪ Convenience

▪ Gives standardised measure

▪ Comparable scores

▪ Can have a range of positive and negative items (acquiescence bias)

Can you think of any problems with measuring attitudes this way?

Question 17

Give osme weaknesses to Likert scales

Answer 17

▪ Weaknesses

▪ Can force people to agree/disagree with ideas that may not correspond with how they see things

▪ Can provide information on the ordering of people’s attitudes on a continuum, but is unable to indicate how close or far apart the different attitude might be

▪ Social desirability

Question 18

Outline psychological measures for testing attitide agrreableness

Answer 18

Physiological measures

▪ Skin resistance, heart rate, and pupil dilation (Rankin & Campbell, 1955; Westie & DeFleur, 1959; Hess, 1965).

▪ Procedure: compare a physiological reading taken in the presence of a neutral object, with one taken in the presence of the attitude object

▪ What are some of the problems you can think of associated with physiological measures of attitudes?

Question 19

How do attitudes change?

Answer 19

What we feel may not necassarily be related to what we think

the thought/ feeling componant may not predict our behaviouer

Question 20

Outline why consistency is important in attitudes

Answer 20

attitides change to be consistant with one another

attitides change to be consistant with behaviour

Question 21

Explain cognitive dissonance theory

Answer 21

Cognitive dissonance (Festinger, 1957)

▪ If a cognition (i.e. an attitude) is in direct conflict with another one (or an action), and the two are related in some way, we experience tension

▪ Dissonance is uncomfortable (tension)

▪ We deal with this tension by either changing one of the cognitions, or adding an extra one to “explain” the apparent discrepancy

Question 22

how is dissonance initiated?

Answer 22

1. Forced compliance
2. Decision-making
3. Effort 

▪ All forms will lead to actions that aim to reduce dissonance

Question 23

Explain how forced complience leads to dissonance

Answer 23

Forced compliant behaviour

▪ Festinger & Carlsmith (1959)

▪ Boring task for 1 hour

▪ Persuade another person that the task was interesting, educational, worthwhile

▪ Paid either $1 or $20 for doing so

$1 more likely to change attitude because $20 did it just ofr money

Question 24

explain how disision making leads to dissonance

Answer 24

Decision-making (Brehm, 1956)

▪ Participants asked to rate eight products (e.g., coffee maker, toaster, radio) from (1) definitely not desirable - (8) definitely desirable

▪ After rating these objects, participants were informed that their payment would be one of these products

▪ Ps offered choice between two highly desirable products (e.g., rated 5> on the scale) – high dissonance ▪ Ps offered choice between one highly desirable (>5) and one lower in desirability (e.g., at least 3 points lower) – low dissonance

▪ Ps given one product highly desirable product but no choice made – control

▪ Participants then provided factual information about each product and asked to rate products again

Question 25

explain how effort leads to dissonance

Answer 25

I suffered for it, so I like it

Question 26

how can you induce complience?

Answer 26

foot in the door technique

saying yes to a small faour makes it harder to say no to a larger one

Question 27

how can self perception explain complience?

Answer 27

Self-perception (Bem, 1972)

▪ Attitudes informed by behaviour

▪ We make inferences about our own attitudes, based on behaviour, in the same way that we make inferences about the attitudes of others

▪ Can explain compliance – a change in behaviour or expressed attitudes in responses to requests, coercion or group pressure

Question 28

explain the Yale attitude change approach

Answer 28

According to this approach, attitude change/persuasion is influenced by 3 factors
▪ Source – originator of communication
▪ Message – features of the communication itself
▪ Audience – characteristics of who is receiving the message

Question 29

explain the source element of the YAle attitude change approach

Answer 29

(Hovlandet al., 1953)
▪ Source – originator of communication

▪ Credibility

▪ Expertise

▪ Trustworthiness

▪ Appearance

▪ Attractiveness

▪ Similarity

Question 30

Explain the message element of the Yale Attitude Change Approach

Answer 30

▪ Message – features of the communication itself
▪ One sided vs. two sided messages
▪ Effectiveness may depend on the audience
▪ Repetition
▪ Fear arousal

Question 31

Explain the Audience element of the Yale Attitude Change Approach

Answer 31

▪ Audience – characteristics of who is receiving the message
▪ Distraction
▪ Inverted U-curve shape (Rosenblatt, 1966)
▪ Self-Esteem
▪ Inverted U-curve shape (McGuire, 1968)
▪ Age
▪ High susceptibility in early adulthood and later life, but lower susceptibility in middle adulthood (U-curve)
▪ Lifelong openness – individuals to some extent susceptible throughout life

Question 32

is there a difference between active and passive participants in attitude change?

Answer 32

Attitude change more effective if active participator rather than passive recipient (Lewin, 1943)

▪ American housewives to feed families unusual but highly nutritious foods

▪ 32% of women in discussion group went on to serve the new food, compared with only 3% in the lecture group (Lewin, 1943)

▪ Used extensively in community health issues

Question 33

Can attitudes predict behaviour?

Answer 33

▪ The attitude-behaviour problem (La Piere, 1934)

▪ Difference between prejudiced attitudes and discriminatory behaviour

▪ Mixed-race group of diners

▪ 249/250 allowed the group in and served them

▪ 90% of replies indicated that they would decline the booking

Can you think of any other examples where attitudes and behaviours may not always align?

Question 34

Explain Theory of Reasoned Acton (TRA)

Answer 34

▪ Social Psychologists started to ask “how do attitudes guide behaviour?”

▪ When people deliberately attempt to make their behaviour consistent with their attitudes, they form intentions (behavioural intention)

▪ Intentions are the single most important predictor of actual behaviour

TRA (Fishbein & Ajzen, 1974) 
▪ Subjective Norms  
▪ Other people’s beliefs about the behaviour  
▪ Motivation to comply  
▪ Attitudes towards the behaviour  
▪ Beliefs about the behaviour 
 ▪ How the beliefs are evaluated  
▪ Intentions 
 ▪ Behaviour
(see slides for map of this)

Question 35

Explain theory of planned behaviour

Answer 35

▪ TRA emphasises the rationality of human behaviour. Behaviour is under conscious control (e.g., I can exercise more if I want to) ▪ We have more control over some behaviours than others

▪ Volition = perceived behavioural control (PBC) = the extent to which the person believes it is easy or difficult to perform an act (Ajzen, 1989)

▪ PBC can act on either the behavioural intention or directly on the behaviour itself

▪ PBC improves the prediction of accuracy for both intentions and actions (Beck & Ajzen, 1991)