Attitudes and Persuasion

Question 1

What’s the traditional underlying logic about attitudes?

Answer 1

If you know a person’s attitude you can predict their behaviour. If you can change someone’s attitude you can change their behaviour

Question 2

What did Eagly and Chaiken (1993) say about attitudes?

Answer 2

’ Attitude is a Psychological tendency that is expressed by evaluating a particular entity with some degree of favour of disfavour’

Question 3

What is the tripartite view of attitudes?

Answer 3

Attitudes make up 3 components and it’s the overall combination of these components that makes up the attitude

Question 4

What are the three components attitudes are said to be made up of and what are each of them?

Answer 4

• Affective component: refers to the feelings towards the attitude concept (prompts an emotional reaction)
• Cognitive component: thoughts and beliefs about an object
• Behavioural component: intended action with respect to object (what you would do in the future in response to the attitude object)

Question 5

Do the different components of the attitude object always have to be in line with each-other?

Answer 5

No. E.g. negative cognitive component about eating cake but positive affective component

Question 6

What are ambivalent attitudes and give an example

Answer 6

They consist of both positive and negative evaluations of the same object. E.g. arachnophobes know that spiders are harmless (positive cognition) but will still feel fear (negative affect) and run away shrieking (negative behaviour) on seeing a spider

Question 7

What are the different theories about where attitudes come from?

Answer 7

Social Experiences (learning):
- Evaluative conditioning 
- Mere exposure effect 
Biological predispositions:
- genetic basis of attitudes
Interpretation of our own behaviour:
- self perception theory

Question 8

What is Pavolvian conditioning?

Answer 8

Where a stimulus is paired with another stimulus and the unconditioned stimulus will eventually trigger a response. E.g. if a bell is rung every time a dog gets food the dog will start to salivate whenever it hears the bell

Question 9

What is evaluative conditioning?

Answer 9

• a subtype of pavlovian conditioning
• You take a stimulus that is already charged with a feeling and pair it with a neutral object/person. The more someone hears this stimulus being associated with a feeling the more they will begin to believe it
• EC is used to explain prejudices
• E.g. if a child is living in a home where they hear negative words paired with the word ‘Muslim’ it leads to the child holding negative attitudes towards Muslims

Question 10

What was the experiment Krosnick, Betz, Jussim and Lynn did regarding evaluative conditioning?

Answer 10

Presented participants 9 pictures of female stranger. In each picture she was performing everyday activities. In between the pictures of the stranger other images were flashed up for a very brief period of time (subliminal level) which were either positive or negative. Ratings of the picture (DVs)

• Overall attitude towards unfamiliar person: Positive condition liked the stranger more compared with negative condition
• Personality characteristics: thought the woman was more warm with positive conditioning
• Physical attractiveness: thought she was more attractive with positive conditioning
• Seems that attitudes are learnt and develop in part as a result of the context in which we are exposed to the attitude object

Question 11

Who proposed the mere exposure effect?

Answer 11

Robert Zanjoc

Question 12

What does the mere exposure effect say

Answer 12

Found people tend to like a particular stimulus the more they encounter it as long as it isn’t inherently harmful

Question 13

What was Zanjoc’s (1986) experiment to display the mere exposure effect?

Answer 13

• Participants were shown 12 Chinese characters to non-Chinese speakers
• Different levels of frequency: Either 25 times, 10 times, twice or not at all
• DV: rating of liking of characters
• Results: Characters were liked more the more times they had been presented

Question 14

What was Mita’s (1973) experiment to show the mere exposure effect?

Answer 14

• Photographed female students on campus and printed images in either the ‘standard view’ or mirror image view
• She found 66% of PS preferred the mirror image
• 65% of their close friends preferred the actual picture because that’s what they’re used to seeing
• Good evidence for the mere-exposure effect

Question 15

What is the idea of Perceptual fluency?

Answer 15

That people are intrinsically cognitively lazy and therefore like things that are easy to encode and process. Objects are easier to process if they are more familiar and this causes a positive sensation that is then misattributed as ‘liking’

Question 16

What are good studies to use to test if attitudes are biologically based?

Answer 16

Twin studies. We can ask identical and non-identical twins who grew up in the same environment about their attitudes and compare the extent to which the pair of twins share attitudes

Question 17

What’s the rationale behind twin studies?

Answer 17

• Take sets of MZ (identical) and DZ twins where each twin in the set grew up with the other twin
• If MZ twins share more similar attitudes than DZ twins, this would provide evidence that genes play an important role in attitude formation
• Standard way of expressing how well genes account for differences in people’s traits. Heritability Coefficient which ranges from 0 to +1
• A HC close to zero indicates that almost all the variability in an attitude is due to environmental factors
• A HC close to one indicated that almost all the variability in a trait comes from genetic differences

Question 18

what is Olson, Venon, Harris and Jang’s (2001) study about the relationship between genes and attitudes?

Answer 18

• Surveyed 332 pairs of adult twins (191 MZ and 141 DZ) on a 30 item questionnaire measuring attitudes
• Found 26/30 attitudes yielded high HCs for MZ but not DZ twins
• Suggests a role for genetics in attitude formation

Question 19

What are the criticisms of Olson, Venon, Harris and Jang’s (2001) study?

Answer 19

• assumes a constant environment for identical and non-identical twins
• whereas identical twins are more likely to have experienced the same things at the same time (as they were more likely to have been treated as the same entity) than non-identical twins.
• And so non-identical twins would probably experience the world slightly differently to each-other

Question 20

What does the biological basis of attitudes theory actually mean?

Answer 20

• Doesn’t mean that genes cause specific attitudes
• Means that genes lead to the expression of certain personality characteristics and that these might mediate the target behaviour
• People like things that they’re good at. E.g. if you’re short you probably wouldn’t be good at basketball and therefore not like it. So it would be the same for your identical twin.

Question 21

What’s the self perception theory?

Answer 21

The idea that people interpret their own attitudes through their behaviour, especially when attitudes are weak, ambiguous or not rehearsed

Question 22

What is Britol and Petty’s (2003) study on the self perception theory

Answer 22

• Ps told they were taking part in a consumer study: test sound quality of a pair of headphones
• Half participants told to listen to a radio programme and test sound be either move head up-and-down motion (nodding)
• Half Ps told to test sound by moving their head side-to-side motion (shaking head)
• Results: Ps attitudes to the message in the earphones (introducing ID cards) was taken. More likely to agree with message when they moved their heads up and down vs side to side
• Evidence that when attitudes are not well rehearsed we use our behaviours to influence our attitudes