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.
How do attitudes predict behaviours? - Theory of Planned Behaviour
Theory of Planned Behaviour - people make a decision to behave in a particular way as a result of a sequence of rational thought processes.
Intention for action depends on -
1. Attitudes towards behaviour
2. Subjective norms
3. Perceived behavioural control
Bodily States can affect Attitude
Bodily states can influence attitudes, social perception, and emotion.
Strack et al. (1988) - Bodily States can affect Attitudes
- Watch cartoons either holding a pen between their lips or teeth - facial feedback hypothesis.
- Results: Subjects reported more intense humor responses when cartoons were presented under facilitating conditions than under inhibiting conditions that precluded labeling of the facial expression in emotion categories.
Limitation of Strack et al. (1988)
- Limitation - replication studies have failed to find evidence for this effect !
