Attitudes and Attitude Change Flashcards
What is an attitude?
A mental representation that summarizes an individual’s evaluation of a particular person, thing, action, group, or idea
What are two functions of attitudes?
Mastery functions
Connectedness functions
What are mastery functions?
Organize knowledge and guide behavior
What are connectedness functions?
Express identity and impression management
What does organizing knowledge allow us to do?
- Helps our organization of structures of concepts
- Guides out attention
What does guiding behavior allow us to do?
What to approach and avoid
What does expressing identity allow us to do?
Part of self expression
What does impression management allow us to do?
- Gain acceptance into a new group
- Make a good impression
What are the ABCs?
These are things that contribute to an attitude?
- Cognitive knowledge
- Behavior
- Affective emotion
Explain the cognitive knowledge, affective emotion, and behavior towards cigarettes
Affective = feels disgust about cigarettes
Cognitive = knowing cigarettes are bad for you
Behavioral = Using self-perception, I move away from someone when they are smoking
What are cognitive-based attitudes?
When an evaluation is based primarily on beliefs about the properties of an attitude object
When do we use cognitive-based attitudes?
Especially when an object has functional use and we are trying to weight the pros and cons
What are affective-based attitudes?
An attitude rooted more in emotions and values than on an objective appraisal of pros and cons
What are behavior-based attitudes?
Using an evaluation of your own behavior to determine your evaluation of an attitude object
What is the function of behavior-based attitudes?
Self-perception theory: People become aware of certain attitudes by observing their own behavior
What are two aspects of attitudes?
Direction (positive and negative) and intensity (how likely are you to have intense emotions about something, which will gauge your preference for the attitude object)
What are three ways to form an attitude?
- Systematic processing (controlled thinking)
- Superficial cues (automatic thinking)
- Conditioning (classical and operant conditioning)
What are the steps in forming an attitude based on systematic processing?
- Attending to information
- Comprehending information
- Reacting to information
- Accepting or rejecting a given position
What does systematic processing result in?
Creating more persistent attitudes
What is a function of the familiarity heuristic?
Mere Exposure Effect: By making a stimulus accessible to an individual’s perception multiple times, it enhances the attitude towards that stimulus
What did the Zajonc’s “language learning” study show?
Turkish and Chinese words shown at higher frequencies were rated higher in terms of “goodness of meaning” than words shown at lower frequencies
What are three examples of heuristics that are superficial cue?
Attractiveness heuristic, expertise heuristic, and message length heuristic
What effect is an example of an attractiveness heuristic?
Halo effect: When one characteristic of a person is used to make an overall judgement of that person or thing
When do attitudes predict behavior?
Spontaneous behaviors (attitude accessibility: how much experience you have with something) vs. deliberate behaviors (harder to know)
What is the theory of planned behavior?
Behavioral intention –> behavior
- Specific attitudes are what drives the execution of that behavior
What does the birth control study tell us about predicting behavior?
The more specific something is the more it will predict a specific attitude about that behavior
What are three things that predict behavioral intentions?
Attitude toward the behavior, subjective norms, perceived behavioral control (they matter but are not meant to be used uniformly: one does not have an effect size bigger than the other. it just depends on the circumstance)
Which perspective is most closely related to the notion of behaviorally-based attitudes?
Self-perception theory
Your best friend, Winona, may or may not visit New York this weekend. According to the theory of planned behavior, which information could be most useful in helping you predict whether Winona will actually travel to New York?
Winona’s intention to visit New York (this was the most specific option)
What is one way to get people to change their attitude about something?
Effort justification –> experience cognitive dissonance and then change behavior based on changed attitude
What are two different routes to persuasion? What model is this based on?
Central and peripheral routes: The Elaboration Likelihood Model
When are people more likely to be convinced using central persuasion? What does this result in?
When people have the motivation and ability to pay attention: this results in more persistent attitudes
When are people more likely to be convinced using peripheral persuasion? What does this result in?
When people do not have the motivation or ability to pay attention: this attitude change is more temporary
In the elaboration likelihood model experiment which variables were manipulated for substantiative cues, superficial cues, and motivation to pay attention?
- Substantiative cues: argument quality (strong vs. weak)
- Superficial cues: expert vs. non-expert
- Motivation to pay attention: low vs. high
Does mood affect attitude change?
Yes - bad mood leads to more systematic processing and consideration of the pros and cons while with superficial cues it lead to more comparable ratings
How do we resist persuasion?
Attitude inoculation
What does attitude inoculation do?
Exposing people to small doses of counter-attitudinal arguments to make them resistant to later attempts to change their attitude
- This activates threat and generates counter arguments
Attitude inoculation is the process of making people immune to persuasion attempts by __________.
Exposing them to arguments against their position
Why do persuasion attempts backfire?
Psychological reactance
What is psychological reactance?
Freedom threatened, unpleasant state of resistance, perform behavior to reduce resistance
What is an example of a study that represents psychological reactance?
Graffiti study: The stronger in force of a message was about doing graffiti the more it was vandalized
