Attitudes and persuasion Flashcards
Attitude
Evaluation of how we feel about certain things
Mastery function of attitudes
Help us organize knowledge and guides behavior
Connectedness function of attitudes
Express identity, impression management
Affective based attitudes
Emotional reaction to attitude object guides feelings
Behavioral based attitudes
How we engage with object/behave influences our feelings
Cognitive based attitudes
Using knowledge to determine our feelings (weighing pros and cons)
2 key aspects of attitudes
Direction (positive/negative/ambivalent) and intensity (how important attitude is to you)
Classical conditioning
Stimulus that elicits an emotional response is accompanied by a neutral, nonemotional stimulus and eventually, the neutral stimulus elicits the emotional response by itself
Familiarity heuristic
We like things we’re familiar with
Attractiveness heuristic
We like things associated with attractive/likeable people
Expertise heuristic
More likely to form an attitude based around what an expert says
Study on minimal groups paradigms
White people categorize people who are racially ambiguous as Black when they are angry - randomly assigned either red or blue, told who is in-group vs out-group; more likely to categorize angry faces as out-group members
Familiarity heuristic study
Presented non-Mandarin speaking Chinese participants with Chinese characters; liked the characters that were familiar even if they didn’t have specific memories about them
Message length heuristic
Longer messages are more important/persuasive (even if argument is poor)
Forming an attitude based on systematic processing
Attending to info, comprehend it, reaction, accept/reject a specific position, persistent attitudes will hold up better