Chapter 7 - Attitudes Flashcards
What are attitudes?
Evaluations of people, objects, and ideas. They are important because they often determine what we do.
List 2 sources of attitudes.
1) Genes
2) Social Experiences
Provide evidence on how we can derive attitudes based on the genes we have.
Identical twins share more attitudes than do fraternal twins, even when the identical twins were raised in different homes and never knew each other.
- Eg: Identical twins had more similar attitudes towards the death penalty and jazz than fraternal twins did.
What are the limitations of adopting the view that genes determine our attitudes?
However, this does not mean to say that there are specific genes that determine our attitudes; it is highly unlikely.
- Some attitudes are an indirect function of our genetic makeup.
- They are related to things such as our temperament and personality, which are directly related to our genes.
- People may have inherited a temperament and personality from their parents that make them predisposed to like jazz more than pop music.
What are the 3 components of our attitudes?
Cognitive, affective, behavioural
Describe the cognitive component of attitudes.
An attitude based primarily on people’s beliefs about the properties of an object
Allows us to classify the pluses and minuses of an object so that we can quickly determine whether we want to have anything to do with it.
Eg: Attitudes towards a basic object like vacuum cleaner: Would be likely related to how well it cleans up dirt and how much it costs, not how sexy it makes you feel
Describe the affective component of attitudes
An attitude based more on people’s feelings and values than on their beliefs about the nature of an attitude object
What are attitudes that are most likely to be affectively based?
Politics, sex, religion.
People seem to vote more with their hearts than their minds.
Eg: ⅓ of voters voted based on their feelings and actually knew virtually nothing about these specific politicians
List 4 sources of affectively based attitudes
1) People’s values, such as basic religious and moral beliefs.
The function of such attitudes is not so much to paint an accurate picture of the world as to express and validate one’s basic value system
People’s feelings about such issues (eg abortion, death penalty) are often based more on their sense of value than on a cold examination of facts.
2) Sensory reactions
Eg: Liking the taste of chocolate despite the amount of calories in it
3) Aesthetic reactions
Admiring a painting or the shape and colour of a car
4) Conditioning: Classical or operant conditioning
Although there are many various sources of affectively based attitudes, why can they all be grouped under the category “Affectively based attitudes”?
1) They don’t come from a rational examination of the issues.
2) They are not governed by logic
3) They are often linked to people’s values, so efforts to change them challenge those values.
What is classical conditioning? Give an example of how it can lead to the formation of an affectively based attitude
The phenomenon whereby a stimulus that elicits an emotional response is repeatedly paired with a neutral stimulus that does not, until the neutral stimulus takes on the emotional properties of the first stimulus.
Eg: When you were a child, you experienced feelings of warmth and love when you visited your grandmother. Her house also smelled faintly of mothballs.
Eventually, the smell of mothballs along will trigger the emotions you experience during your visits, through the process of classical conditioning.
What is operant conditioning? Give an example of how it can lead to the formation of an affectively based attitude
The phenomenon whereby behaviours we freely choose to perform becomes more or less frequent, depending on whether they are followed by a reward or punishment
Eg: A 4 y/o white girl goes to the playground with her father and begins to play with an African American girl.
Her father expresses strong disapproval, telling her “We don’t play with that kind of child.”
It won’t take long before the child associates interacting with African Americans with disapproval, and therefore adopts her father’s racist attitudes.
What is a behaviourally based attitude and what theory supports it?
An attitude based on observations of how one behaves toward an object
Self-perception theory
What does the self-perception theory propose with regard to behaviourally based attitudes?
Likely to rely on observing behaviour to infer attitudes when
a) initial attitude is weak or ambiguous
b) only when there are no other plausible explanations for the behaviour.
Eg Asked to exercise to lose weight or because doctor has asked you to do so → unlikely to assume that you run and work out because you enjoy it.
Define explicit attitudes.
Attitudes that we consciously endorse and can easily report. They are what we think of as our attitudes. Suspectible to social desirability bias though.
_______ attitudes are attitudes that exist outside of conscious awareness, and can be studied using _____.
List some traits associated with this attitude.
Implicit; Implicit Association Test (IAT)
Involuntary, uncontrollable and at times, unconscious evaluations.
Distinguish between explicit and implicit attitudes, and provide empirical evidence where necessary.
Implicit attitudes are rooted more in people’s childhood experiences, whereas explicit attitudes are rooted more in their recent experiences
Evidence: Measuring college students’ implicit and explicit attitudes towards overweight people by getting them to report their current weight and their weight when they were growing up
- Participants’ implicit attitudes toward overweight people were predicted by their childhood weight but not their current weight, whereas their explicit attitudes were predicted by the current weight but not their childhood weight.
- People whose mother was overweight and were close to their mothers had positive implicit attitudes towards overweight people, even if their explicit attitudes were negative.
- People can often have different implicit and explicit attitudes towards the same thing, one rooted more in childhood experiences and the other based more on their adult experiences.
What do we do when we have a spontaneous attitude towards something?
We think little about what we are about to do
Attitudes will predict spontaneous behaviours only when they are highly ________ to people
accessible
What is attitude accessibility?
The strength of the association between an attitude object and a person’s evaluation of that object, measured by the speed with which people can report how they feel about the object
Why is it that attitudes will predict spontaneous behaviors only when they are highly accessible to people?
When accessibility is high, your attitude comes to mind whenever you see or think about the attitude object.
More likely to predict spontaneous behaviors because people are more likely to be thinking about their attitude when they are called on to act.
What happens when attitude accessibility is low?
When accessibility is low, your attitude comes to mind slowly.
How is the amount of direct experience related to one’s attitude accessibility towards something?
The more direct the experience people have with an attitude object, the more accessible their attitude will be, and the more accessible it is, the more likely their spontaneous behaviour will be consistent with that attitude.
Accessibility can predict deliberative behaviour as well as that of spontaneous behaviour. True or false?
False.
Under these conditions, the accessibility of our attitude is less important.
Given enough time and motivation to think about an issue, even inaccessible attitudes can be conjured up and influence the choices we make.
It is only when we have to decide how to act on the spot, without time to think it over, that accessibility becomes crucial.
What theory can explain the predictability of deliberative behaviours?
Theory of Planned Behaviour
According to this theory, when people have time to contemplate how they are going to behave, the best predictor of their behaviour is their intention, which is determined by 3 things: their attitude towards the specific behaviour, subjective norms, and perceived behavioural control
List 3 determinants of intention
1) Their attitude towards specific behaviours
2) Subjective Norms
3) Perceived behavioural control
What does the Theory of Planned Behaviour propose about the influence of specific behaviours on the predictability of deliberative attitudes?
The more specific the attitude towards the behaviour in question, the better that attitude can be expected to predict the behaviour.
Provide an empirical study about the Theory of Planned Behavior and specific attitudes
Eg: Asking a sample of married women for their attitudes toward birth control pills, ranging from their general attitude towards birth control to their specific attitude towards birth control pills during the next 2 years. 2 years later, they asked the women whether they had used birth control pills at any time since the last interview.
The general attitudes expressed 2 years earlier did not predict the women’s subsequent use of birth control at all, as they did not take into account other factors that could influence such a decision, from concern about the long-term effects of the pill to their attitudes regarding other available forms of birth control.
The more specific the original question was about the act of using birth control pills, the better the attitude predicted actual behaviour, as evidenced by a higher correlation coefficient.
What are subjective norms?
Refers to people’s beliefs about how others they care about will view the behavior in question
You want to predict whether OSH will go to an anime festival and we know that she has zero interest in anime and the likes of it. So you say that she wouldn’t go.
However, if her friend is cosplaying in the event, what would she do and why?
Still go for the festival.
- You can assume that her close friend will be disappointed if she does not come to support her, and view her failure to do so as a slap in the face.
- Hence, knowing this subjective norm, OSH’s belief about how her close friend will her behavior, we can likely predict that she will attend her festival even though she isn’t a big fan of anime.
What is perceived behavioural control?
The ease with which they believe they can perform the behaviour
- If people think it is difficult to perform a behaviour, such as remembering to buy a condom before having sex, they will not form a strong intention to do so.
- If people think it is easy to perform a behaviour, such as remembering to buy milk before you head home, they will be more likely to form a strong intention to do so.