Attitudes Flashcards

Question

What are implicit measures?

Answer 1

Implicit association test (Greenwald et al., 1998) Reaction time when (target category) & positive share a side compared with reaction times when (target category) & bad share a side The idea that beliefs are structured in memory, if you have negative attitudes towards certain groups, those negative ideas will come to mind much quicker and be categorised faster.

Answer 2

* Attitudes changes to be consistent with each other * Attitudes change to be consistent with behaviour The basic assumption that one important motive behind our behaviour is to feel like we are relatively consistent in the way we think and behave. Having consistent beliefs and behaviours may provide a much stronger sense of meaning about ourselves or the nature of reality.

Answer 3

* 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 (whether we are aware of it or not). * Dissonance is uncomfortable (tension)

Answer 4

Sometimes people may point out our inconsistent behaviour or it could be an unconscious process where we experience a sense of uncomfortableness which we seek to reduce. This leads to adapting attitudes or alternatively adding an extra attitude that tries to explain why the attitudes are inconsistent and this new attitude will explain and reduce the dissonance.

Answer 5

Dissonance can be initiated in different ways: 1. Forced compliance 2. Decision-making 3. Effort All forms will lead to actions that aim to reduce dissonance.

Answer 6

* Participants given a boring task for 1 hour * Have to persuade another person that the task was interesting, educational, worthwhile. * Paid either $1 or $20 * Participants getting $20 didn’t arouse any sense of dissonance as they told the lie for money. * However, there was dissonance for the participants getting $1 as they weren’t getting paid very much for the job they had to do. * Control participants (who weren’t given any money) and the $20 participants both rated how interesting the experiment was at the same level. * Participants who were given $1 had no incentive to lie as the money was so little so this roused a sense of dissonance. To reduce this tension, they changed their attitude towards the study and started to genuinely believe that it was an interesting study and worthwhile.

Answer 7

* 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: o Participants offered choice between two highly desirable products (e.g., rated 5> on the scale) – high dissonance o Participants offered choice between one highly desirable (>5) and one lower in desirability (e.g., at least 3 points lower) – low dissonance o Participants given one product that was highly desirable – control. * Participants then provided with factual information about each product and asked to rate them again. * There was no real change in the control group or the low dissonance group as they already liked the product and it was an easy choice. * For the higher dissonance group attitudes towards their chosen product became more positive and their attitude towards the rejected product became more negative. * Essentially, they are changing their attitudes to make the decision less difficult in their mind. Although it was difficult to choose in the first place participants became very confident in the item that they chose.

Answer 8

When people have a goal, even if their attitude was very negative to begin with, over time because they are doing it a lot and have spent a lot of time/effort on it, some tension arises which can be overcome by adapting their attitude to view it as possible.

Answer 9

* 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

Answer 10

Foot-in-the-door techniques. E.g. They start off with small requests e.g. Pret offering a free month of coffee for a subscription to them and then those requests getting larger and larger (paying for the subscription).

Answer 11

According to this approach, attitude change/persuasion is influenced by 3 factors: * Source – originator of communication (who is communicating the information and the features of that person) * Message – features of the communication itself (what is actually being said) * Audience – characteristics of who is receiving the message (who is receiving the message and the features of that person)

Answer 12

Depending on the sources: • Credibility • Expertise • Trustworthiness E.g. We often see doctors as having a high level of expertise and are more likely to passively accept what they say. Less likely to be convinced by what an average person you meet is saying. * Appearance * Attractiveness * Similarity Less rational but because we often value attractiveness in our culture and want to be close to people that are popular, so they have more influence in our attitudes.

Answer 13

• One sided vs. two sided messages Effectiveness may depend on the audience (those with high IQ’s are more critical and could be influenced by a two-sided argument) • Repetition e.g. trump repeating ‘fake news’ If he said it once the audience might ignore it but the repetition causes them to think there must be some kind of truth to it) • Fear arousal E.g. in the Covid-19 era we can tap into people’s fears and change their attitudes about how they should behave. Or talking about the risk of heart attacks from smoking can induce fear and change your attitude.

Answer 14

An inverted U-curve. Low levels of fear don't affect attitudes. As we increase fear, attitudes change. It reaches a point where it tapers off and you can increase fear but there's no influence on attitudes. Perhaps due to people feeling overwhelmed by how they can cope with such prospects. E.g. a fear of corona virus and catching the disease may not amount to any changes in attitude as people feel that they can’t cope with it. It’s better to instil some fear (yes you could catch it and die but you can overcome this by social distancing) as this could alleviate some of that problem and make it not as scary. Too much fear could induce a sense of fatalism, especially in the context of life-threatening diseases.

Answer 15

• Distraction Inverted U curve shape (Rosenblatt, 1966) The extent to which you are paying attention to the message, high levels of distraction will lead to low levels of persuasion. Those paying high levels of attention will be more critical and resistant to changing their attitudes. People who are in the middle and paying some attention may be most susceptible to persuasion. • Self-esteem Inverted U curve shape Low self-esteem is often related to anxiety and may find it more difficult to attend to the information – getting back to the distraction issue and so are unlikely to change their attitude. Furthermore, those with a high self-esteem have very resistant attitudes and are unlikely to change them because they are very confident in what they believe. People with moderate levels of self-esteem tend to be the ones who are more likely to be malleable in their attitudes. • Lifelong openness – individuals to some extent susceptible throughout life. One possibility is that there is a high level of susceptibility in early adulthood as well as later life but during mid-life your attitudes are fairly resistant. When you are young your more impressionistic and attitudes aren’t so crystallised. Another idea is that there’s just generally a lifelong sense of openness to attitude change, so some possibility that people are willing to change their attitudes throughout their life.

Answer 16

Attitude change more effective if active participator rather than passive recipient (Lewis, 1943) * American housewives to feed families unusual but highly nutritious foods to see if they would change their eating habits * 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

Answer 17

* Difference between prejudiced attitudes and discriminatory behaviour. He observed the difference in people who have prejudicial attitudes and whether they actually engaged in 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 * This is a really large discrepancy as almost all of the diners were served even though 90% of the servers indicated that they wouldn’t accept the booking.

Answer 18

Attitudes are often a very broad inference but how we behave in a given moment is more situational and context specific. So, we might find very weak links between attitudes and behaviour because we’re just not measuring them in a very good sense. E.g. Women’s use of birth control pills (Davidson & Jaccard, 1979) They found that the more specific the attitude was (e.g. a certain type of birth control), the stronger the correlation between their attitude and behaviour. Whereas when it was a broader attitude towards birth control in general, it didn’t predict their behaviour very well.

Answer 19

E.g. Political party – high; blood donation – low (Kraus, 1995) It’s very easy to act on your attitudes towards a political party, for example voting for that party on election day. So, you can expect a very strong correlation. However blood donation is different as you might have a very positive attitude towards blood donation but this doesn’t mean you would donate blood yourself and so this would create a poor prediction of your behaviour.

Answer 20

Role of individual differences e.g. Self-monitoring: low self-monitors have higher attitude-behaviour correlation (Snyder & Kendzierski, 1982) People with low levels of self-monitoring are less likely to engage in self presentational tactics and more likely to enact upon their attitudes in an implicit, intuitive sense. Their attitude and behaviour are likely to be very similar. In comparison those with high levels of self-monitoring may be much more likely to be aware of socially desirable effects and wanting to be self-presentational.

Answer 21

Theory of reasoned action which suggests that it’s not necessarily attitudes that just determine our behaviour but also the subjective norms of what we think other people do (what they think and what we think other they expect of us) is also going to influence our behaviour. We have our attitude towards our behaviour and we also have subjective norms and the two will lead to our behavioural intent but whether that ends up translating to a behaviour will depend on several other factors. So, the reasons why attitudes don’t always strongly predict behaviour is because firstly there are other components involved but it also may just lead to a behavioural intent instead of a behaviour.

Answer 22

This is an extension of the theory of reasoned action. It adds in the idea of perceived control and whether we feel it’s within our ability to engage in some behaviours. E.g. the subjective norm would be that exercise is the right thing to do but you might find that exercise is beyond your control as you are out of shape and think you can’t go out for a run or join a football game.