Chapter 6 & 7: Attitudes and Attitude Change Flashcards
Attitude
An evaluation of an object in a positive or negative fashion that includes three components: affect, cognition, and behavior.
What is the affect component of attitude?
Emotion - how much someone likes or dislikes an object
What is the cognition component of attitude?
Thoughts that typically reinforce a person’s feelings
Include knowledge and beliefs about the object as well as associated memories and images
What is the behavior component of attitude?
The affective evaluation of good versus bad is connected to a behavioral tendency to either approach or avoid.
Likert scale
A numerical scale used to assess people’s attitudes; a scale that includes a set of possible answers with labeled anchors on each extreme
Ex. 1 = strongly disagree, 7 = strongly agree
Response latency
The amount of time it takes to respond to a stimulus, such as an attitude question.
A way to measure attitudes
Implicit attitude measures
An indirect measure of attitudes that doesn’t involve a self-report
Physiological measures
Such as the increased heart rate and sweaty palms associated with fear can reveal people’s attitudes
LaPiere 1934 Touring Study
Procedures: LaPiere spent two years touring the United States with a young Chinese couple, visiting numerous hotels, campgrounds, restaurants, and cafes. Although prejudice and discrimination against Chinese
individuals were common at the time, LaPiere and his traveling companions were denied service by only one of the 250 establishments they visited, leading LaPiere to wonder if maybe anti-Chinese prejudice wasn’t so strong after all. LaPiere wrote to all of the establishments they had visited and asked whether their policy was to serve people of the “Chinese race.” About 90 percent of the respondents said they wouldn’t.
Findings: Suggested that attitudes don’t predict behavior very well.
Elaboration Likelihood Model (ELM)
A model of persuasion that maintains that there are two routes to persuasion: the central route and the peripheral route.
Central route
A route to persuasion wherein people think carefully and deliberately about the content of a persuasive message, attending to its logic and the strength of its arguments as well as to related evidence and principles.
They rely on relevant information from their own experiences, memories, and knowledge to evaluate the message.
More effective for long-lasting attitude change
Peripheral route
A route to persuasion wherein people attend to relatively easy-to-process, superficial cues related to a persuasive message, such as its length or the expertise or attractiveness of the source of the message.
What factors determine whether we will engage in central or peripheral processing in response to a persuasive message?
Motivation and ability
How does motivation impact our response to a persuasive message?
When a message has personal consequences, we’re more likely to be motivated to go the central route and carefully work through the arguments and relevant information.
How does ability impact our response to a persuasive message?
When ability is low like the arguments are presented too quickly or are hard to comprehend we’re more apt to rely on easy-to-process peripheral cues.
Petty, Cacioppo & Goldman 1981 Study
Aim: Central vs peripheral route
Procedures: Students were asked to consider the implementation of a policy that would require all graduating seniors at their university to take a comprehensive exam. Th ey read either eight strong arguments or eight weak arguments in support of the policy. The
researchers manipulated personal relevance by telling the participants that the policy would be initiated either the following year (meaning participants themselves would have to take the exam) or in ten years (presumably well the participants’ graduation). Finally, source expertise was varied: half the participants were told that the arguments were generated by a local high school class and the other half that the arguments came from the Carnegie Commission on Higher Education.
Findings: When the message was personally relevant to the students, they were motivated to pay attention to the strength of the arguments, and the arguments’ strength played a big role in whether they were persuaded. But among students for whom the message was not personally relevant, the strength of the arguments didn’t matter very much.
In short, high personal relevance led participants to be persuaded by the strength of the arguments (the central route to persuasion), whereas a lack of
personal relevance led participants to be persuaded by the expertise of the source (the peripheral route to persuasion).
Source characteristics
Characteristics of the person who delivers a persuasive message, such as attractiveness, credibility, and certainty
Sleeper effect
An effect that occurs when a persuasive message from an unreliable source initially exerts little influence but later causes attitudes to shift
Message characteristics
Aspects or content of a persuasive message, including the quality of the evidence and the explicitness of its conclusions, vividness, culture
Identifiable Victim effect
The tendency to be more moved by the vivid plight of a single individual than by the struggles of a more abstract number of people
Audience characteristics
Characteristics of those who receive a persuasive message include the need for cognition (the degree to which they like to think deeply about things), mood, and age.
Agenda control
Efforts by the media to emphasize certain events and topics, thereby shaping which issues and events people think are important
Hostile media phenomemnon
The tendency for people to see media coverage as biased against their own side and in favor of their opponent’s side.
Selective attention
We tune in information that reinforces our attitudes, and we tune out information that contradicts them.
An attentional bias
Selective evaluation
People tend to evaluate information such as the credibility of a source or the soundness of an argument in ways that support their existing beliefs and values.
Ditto and Lopez 1992 Study
Aim: Selective evaluation
Procedures: Undergraduates were given a test for a fictitious medical condition, a deficiency that was supposedly associated with pancreatic disorders later in life. The test was simple: Put saliva on a piece of yellow paper and observe whether it changes color within 20 seconds. In the deficiency condition, participants were told that if the paper remained yellow, they had the medical condition; in the no-deficiency
condition, participants were told that if the paper changed to a dark green, they had a medical condition. The paper remained yellow for all participants throughout the study.
Findings: Participants in the deficiency group took almost 30 seconds longer than those who got more favorable evidence to decide that their test was finished, repeatedly dipping the paper in saliva to give it every possible opportunity to turn green.
Selective framing
Selectively frame issues in a manner that shines a more positive light on positions we support and a more negative light on positions we oppose.
Thought polarization hypothesis
The hypothesis that more extended thought about a particular issue tends to produce a more extreme, entrenched attitude.
What can lead to resistance to attitude changes?
Knowledge on the subject
If the attitude is backed by moral conviction
Attitude inoculation
Small attacks on people’s beliefs that engage their preexisting attitudes, prior commitments, and background knowledge, enabling them to counteract a subsequent larger attack and thus resist persuasion.
McGuire Studies
Aim: Attitude inoculation
Procedures: McGuire first assessed participants’ preexisting attitudes by asking them to endorse different cultural truisms. At some point, from 1 hour to 7 days after the participants indicated their agreement with these truisms, they read brief essays forcefully attacking each. Th ey then rated anew how much they believed each one.
Findings: When the attacks were not preceded by an initial inoculation procedure, the attacks had great influence, cutting expressed belief in the truisms nearly in half.
However, the attacks were much less effective when participants’ attitudes were protected by an initial inoculation.
Both procedures made participants’ initial attitudes much more
resistant to persuasion, but having to refute arguments against their initial positions was especially protective
