Chapter 5 Flashcards
What is an attitude?
(a) A relatively enduring organisation of beliefs, feelings and behavioural tendencies towards socially significant objects, groups, events or symbols
(b) A general feeling or evaluation – positive or negative – about some person, object or issue.
What is a one-component attitude model?
An attitude consists of affect towards or evaluation of the object.
What is a two-component attitude model?
An attitude consists of a mental readiness to act. It also guides evaluative (judgemental) responses.
What is a three-component attitude model?
An attitude consists of cognitive, affective and behavioural components. This threefold division has an ancient heritage, stressing thought, feeling and action as basic to human experience.
What are cognitive consistency theories?
A group of attitude theories stressing that people try to maintain internal consistency, order and agreement among their various cognitions.
What is balance theory?
According to Heider, people prefer attitudes that are consistent with each other over those that are inconsistent. A person (P) tries to maintain consistency in attitudes to, and relationships with, other people (O) and elements of the environment (X).
What is a multiple-act criterion?
Term for a general behavioural index based on an average or combination of several specific behaviours.
What is the theory of reasoned action?
Fishbein and Ajzen’s theory of the relationship between attitudes and behaviour. A specific attitude that has normative support predicts an intention to act, which then predicts actual behaviour.
What is the Theory of Planned Behaviour?
Modification by Ajzen of the theory of reasoned action. It suggests that predicting a behaviour from an attitude measure is improved if people believe they have control over that behaviour.
What is protection motivation theory?
Adopting a healthy behaviour requires cognitive balancing between the perceived threat of illness and one’s capacity to cope with the health regimen.
What is automatic activation?
According to Fazio, attitudes that have a strong evaluative link to situational cues are more likely to come automatically to mind from memory.
What is attitude formation?
The process of forming our attitudes, mainly from our own experiences, the influences of others and our emotional reactions.
What is the mere exposure effect?
Repeated exposure to an object results in greater attraction to that object.
What is evaluative conditioning?
A stimulus will become more liked or less liked when it is consistently paired with stimuli that are either positive or negative.
What is a spreading attitude effect?
A liked or disliked person (or attitude object) may affect not only the evaluation of a second person directly associated but also others merely associated with the second person.
What is modelling?
Tendency for a person to reproduce the actions, attitudes and emotional responses exhibited by a real-life or symbolic model. Also called observational learning.
What are values?
A higher-order concept thought to provide a structure for organising attitudes.
What is ideology?
A systematically interrelated set of beliefs whose primary function is explanation. It circumscribes thinking, making it difficult for the holder to escape from its mould.
What is terror management theory?
The notion that the most fundamental human motivation is to reduce the terror of the inevitability of death. Self-esteem may be centrally implicated in effective terror management.
What are social representations?
Collectively elaborated explanations of unfamiliar and complex phenomena that transform them into a familiar and simple form.
What is the expectancy-value model?
Direct experience with an attitude object informs a person how much that object should be liked or disliked in the future.
What is relative homogeneity effect?
Tendency to see outgroup members as all the same, and ingroup members as more differentiated.
What is a bogus pipeline technique?
A measurement technique that leads people to believe that a ‘lie detector’ can monitor their emotional responses, thus measuring their true attitudes.
What is an implicit association test?
Reaction-time test to measure attitudes – particularly those unpopular attitudes that people might conceal.
What is a one-valence dimension of attitudes?
Continuum from positive to negative attitudes.
What is a two-valence dimension of attitudes?
A graph with positive and negative on x and y axis accordingly, allows attitudinal ambivalence
What are the functions of attitudes?
Knowledge, instrumentality, ego-defense, value expressiveness, easier/faster evaluations and object appraisal (min max punishments and rewards)
How do attitudes emerge?
- Cognitive component - processing of available facts
- Affective component - direct experiences that affect how you feel (mere exposure effect, evaluative conditioning, observing others)
- Behavioural component - perception of your own behaviour
What are different ways to measure attitudes?
- Attitude scales - direct, explicit likert/semantic differential scales
- Physiological measures - measure of affective component with instruments
- Overt behaviour - measure of behavioural component
- Covert/implicit attitudes - spontaneous reactions to the attitude object not based on self-report - IAT and such
What are explicit and implicit attitudes?
Explicit attitudes are consciously accessible and easy to report. Implicit attitudes occur outside of conscious awareness and/or control
How strong can you predict attitudes and behaviour?
There is a relatively small correlation, but certain factors such as the domain of the behaviour, correspondence between measures of attitude and behaviour and accessibility of the attitude
How do attitudes form as part of the socialisation process?
- Direct experience - exposure, classical, operant and evaluative conditioning, social learning, self-perception
- Cognitive - connections leading to an attitude forming based on related concepts
- Sources of learning - parents/peers, mass media/internet
What implicit measures are there?
- Detecting bias in language use
- Attitude priming
- IAT
