Attitudes (VL 4) Flashcards
Attitudes – Definition
Relatively enduring organizations of beliefs, feelings and behavioral tendencies towards socially significant objects, groups, events or symbols
Three components of attitudes
- Affective: The person´s emotions and affect towards the object
- Behavioral: How a person tends to act towards the object
- Cognitive: Consists of thoughts and beliefs the person has about the object
Theories of Attitudes
- Learning theory
- Balance theory
- Cognitive Dissonance theory
Learning theory
- Assumes that a person´s attitudes are based on principles of:
o Association: link in memory between stimuli that are related
o Reinforcement and punishment: person learns to exhibit a particular response
o Imitation: matching thoughts, feelings and behaviors - Transfer of affect: changing an attitude by transferring it to the affect associated with another object (ex. transferring emotions from a sexy model to the car standing by)
Learning Theory - Evaluation
Views people as passive recipients to external forces, model works well when people are unfamiliar with the material
Learning Theory - Cognitive consistency approach
people are striving for coherence and meaning in their attitudes
Heider´s Balance Theory (1946)
- Need to maintain consistency among our feelings and beliefs about what goes together
- Considers mutual evaluations of two people towards each other and of each towards an attitude object eight possible configurations of two people and one object
- Imbalanced structures tend to become balanced by a change in one or more elements (imbalanced systems are unstable)
o Balance: all evaluations are positive, or one is positive and two are negative
o Imbalance: One or three evaluations are negative
Heider´s Balance Theory - Evaluation
Research generally supports predictions; balance pressures are much weaker when we dislike a person than when we like him/her
Cognitive Dissonance Theory (Festinger 1957)
- Concerned with discrepancies between people´s attitudes and their behaviors
- Dissonance: aversive motivational state that results when our behavior is inconsistent with our attitudes
- -> greatest when attitudes and behavior are important to the self (ex. smoking is bad, but you do it anyway)
- Creates psychological tension that people are motivated to reduce
Cognitive Dissonance Theory - Three ways of reducing dissonance
- Changing our behavior (often difficult)
- Trivializing the dissonance
- Changing the attitude
Cognitive Dissonance Theory - Theory of psychological reactance
Non-chosen alternative becomes more attractive (only for a short time)
Dissonance effect
After a short while, opposite kicks in and the liking for the chosen alternative increases and the liking for the non-chosen alternative decreases
Factors increasing dissonance for performing counter attitudinal behavior
- Small threat of punishment
- Behavior is freely chosen
- There is an irrevocable commitment
- Negative consequences were foreseeable
- Person feels responsible for consequences
- Effort is expended
- Questioning self-relevant expectations
Which characteristica do attitudes have, that show a high attitude-behavior consistency?
- Stable
- Important
- Certain
- Consistent between cognition and affect
- Easily accessed
- Formed through direct experience
Strong attitudes
- Are typically stable, personally relevant, held about personally important issues about which one feels extreme and certain
- Are often tied or embedded to other beliefs
- Are often formed through direct experience and become highly accessible as a result
- Are most likely to predict behavior (when accessible in memory)
- Attitudes that are expressed more frequently are more accessible and tend to become more extreme
- Maximum attitude behavior consistency occurs when attitude and behaviors are measured at the same time (ex. wish for children) –> longer time intervals diminish attitude-behavior correlations due to changes in situations, people and attitudes
