ATTITUDES & BEHAVIOUR Flashcards
Attitudes
Attitudes - a person’s evaluations of aspects of their social world.
- Can be positive / negative / ambivalent.
- Can change.
WHY do we form Attitudes? (KUVE)
- Knowledge - functional + useful schemas that help us make sense of complex topics.
- Utilitarian - avoid punishment + obtain rewards - affirm to group membership. If we have socially ‘correct’ attitudes, others may look favourably on you.
- Value expressive - to express our values.
- Ego defensive - to protect ourselves from psychological threats.
HOW do we form Attitudes?
1) Mere exposure - attitudes are shaped by automatic factors in our environment that we are largely unaware of.
E.g. - You may watch a particular news programme on TV because your friends like to watch it and you are more likely to switch over to this programme in future.
2) From the environment - Social Learning Theory (SLT) (Bandura, 1977) - we acquire our attitudes from others + classical conditioning + instrumental/operant conditioning + observational learning.
3) Genetics - Olson et al. (2001) - some evidence from twin studies to suggest that attitudes can be inherited.
The Challenge of Measuring Attitudes
- It is very difficult to measure attitudes (cannot be observed) + self-report measures often used due to this (but only for explicit).
Measures used to measure Explicit and Implicit Attitudes
- Direct measures - to measure explicit attitudes - attitude scales using self-reports.
- Limitation - self-reports have limitations including demand characteristics and social desirability bias !
- Indirect measures - to measure implicit attitudes - bogus pipeline procedure + facial EMG + ERP + fMRI + IAT.
Implicit Association Test (IAT)
Implicit Association Test - RT test that measures the strengths of automatic associations between mental representations of objects (concepts) in memory (implicit attitudes).
- An indirect measure of attitudes.
- E.g. - Can look at the strength of associations between LGBTQ and “good”/”bad” - A response is easier when closely related items share the same response key.
Limitations of IAT
- Important NOT to confuse automatic preference with “racism” (racism and prejudice are EXPLICIT attitudes and IAT can’t measure that).
- Implicit + explicit attitudes tend to be positively correlated (Gawronski & Bodenhausen, 2011).
- Issues with validity - familiarity or cultural knowledge can affect the scores.
- Better predictor within socially sensitive contexts (e.g. discrimination)
- Implicit measures are only weakly predictive of behaviours + NO better than explicit measures.
- Issues of reliability - IAT as only “good for predicting individual behaviour in the aggregate, and the correlations are small”.
Implicit & Explicit Attitudes
- Implicit + explicit attitudes are thought to arise from different mental processes.
- Implicit attitudes come from associative processes.
VS - Explicit attitudes come from propositional processes.
Problem with measuring Explicit Attitudes
- Social desirability bias
How do you reduce “social desirability” bias?
- Anonymous answers, pairing, EEG design, fMRI and masking research design.
Problems with measuring Implicit Attitudes
- Hard to measure an unconscious process.
How do you measure an unconscious process?
- Easier pairings (faster responses) more strongly associated in memory than difficult pairings (slower responses)?
Broockman & Kalla (2015) - Attitude change
- 56 canvassers encouraging active perspective-taking with 501 voters at voters’ doorsteps.
- Results: These conversations substantially reduced transphobia.
- Greater than Americans’ average decrease in homophobia from 1998 to 2012.
- Effects persisted for 3 months, and both transgender and nontransgender were effective.
Limitation of Broockman & Kalla’s (2015) canvassers study
- Issue dependent?
Broockman also found that abortion canvassers failed (abortion may be more closely related to value expressions?)
Relationship between Attitudes & Behaviours
- Correlation between behaviours & attitudes is quite weak (lower than 0.3) ! (LaPiere, 1934).
- More specific attitude = more closely it is linked to behaviour
- Cognitive dissonance - misalignment between our attitudes and behaviours + we change our attitudes to be more consistent with behaviours.
Trafimow (2000) - Habits can predict future behaviour
- University students who habitually used condoms during sex reported that they intended to do so in future sexual encounters.
Duhigg - Habits can be changed intentionally
Why does AA work? (for some)
- Identify triggers (a time, a place, a certain emotional state, the presence of other people or a preceding action)
- Routine = Behaviour (drinking)
- Reward = Socialising, forgetting, pain relief
- Conscious behaviour change leads to more automatic attitude-congruent behaviour.
