Chapter 7: Attitudes & Attitude Change

Question 1

What is the meaning of the word “attitudes”?

Answer 1

Evaluations of people, objects, and ideas. They are important in that they often determine what we do.

Question 2

Name 3 components of attitudes.

Answer 2

1. Cognitive: thoughts and beliefs that people form about the attitude object. Classifying + and - of object to tell whether we want to have anything to do with it.
2. Affective: people’s emotional reactions toward the attitude object. These attitudes stem from people’s religious and moral beliefs or from sensory reaction or aesthetic reaction. Others result from conditioning.
3. Behavioral: how people act toward the attitude object. According to self-perception theory, we don’t know how we feel until we observe our behavior.

Question 3

Conditionings that result into affectively based attitudes.

Answer 3

1. Classical conditioning: stimulus that elicits the emotional response is accompanied by a neutral, non-emotional stimulus until eventually the neutral stimulus elicits the emotional response by itself.
   e. g. As a kid you experienced love in grandma’s house which smelled of mothballs. By smelling it later in life, it will trigger emotions you experienced.
2. Operant conditioning: behaviors we freely choose to perform become more or less frequent, depending on whether they’re followed by reward or punishment.
   e. g. A white child goes to play with black child until dad shows disapproval. The child then begins to adopt dad’s racist attitude.

Question 4

Explicit attitudes

Answer 4

Attitudes we can consciously report easily.

Question 5

Implicit attitude

Answer 5

Attitudes that are involuntary, uncontrollable, and unconscious.

Question 6

Rudman, Phelan, and Heppen’s study (2007)

Answer 6

Implicit attitudes are rooted more in our childhood experiences, whereas explicit attitudes are rooted more in our recent experiences.

Question 7

How do attitudes change?

Answer 7

1. Changing behavior through cognitive dissonance, where people behave inconsistently with their attitudes and cannot find external justification for their behavior. We can get them to find internal justification.
2. Persuasive communication: communication advocating a particular side of an issue.
3. Emotion: fear-arousing communication, heuristic-systematic model of persuasion.
4. If there’s enough confidence in people.

Question 8

Yale Attitude Change approach

Answer 8

Study constructed by Hovland and colleagues, studying conditions under which people are most likely to be influenced by persuasive communications, focusing on

1) source of communication,
2) nature of communication, and
3) nature of audience.

Question 9

Elaboration Likelihood Model (ELM)

Answer 9

Specifies when people will be influenced centrally, when people are motivated and can pay attention to arguments in communication, or peripherally, when people don’t pay attention to arguments but are instead swayed by surface characteristics.

Question 10

What motivates us to pay attention to the arguments?

Answer 10

If it’s more personally relevant to us, then we’re likely to take central route to persuasion.

Question 11

Need for cognition

Answer 11

Personality variable reflecting extent to which we engage in and enjoy effortful cognitive activities.

Question 12

Fear-arousing communication

Answer 12

Persuasive message to change attitude by arousing fears.
Effective way is to induce fear and then give instructions to reduce fear so people can think more rationally.

It fails if

• fear is so overwhelming it disables people’s rational thinking.
• there isn’t enough instructions to reduce fear.

Question 13

Heuristic-systematic model of persuasion

Answer 13

People use heuristics when taking peripheral route to persuasion. Heuristics are mental shortcuts used to make efficient judgements. Our emotions and mood can act as heuristics to determine our attitudes.

Question 14

“How do I feel about it?” heuristic

Answer 14

When we feel good, we have positive attitude.

Problem: we can make mistakes about what’s causing our mood, misattributing feelings created by one source to another.

Question 15

Emotions and different types of attitudes

Answer 15

If people’s attitudes are cognitively-based, the ads focusing on utilitarian aspects of products are successful.
If people’s attitudes are affectively-based, the ads that focus on social identity concerns are more effective.

Question 16

Culture and different types of attitudes

Answer 16

Westerns people base attitudes on individuality and self-improvement, whereas Asian people base theirs on their concerns on standing in social groups.

Question 17

Confidence in thoughts and attitude change

Answer 17

People are more likely to change attitude if they’re confident in their thoughts about, say, ad messages.

Question 18

How to resist persuasive messages?

Answer 18

1. Attitude inoculation: exposing one to small doses of argument against their position to make them immune to attempts to change their attitudes. One way is to use cultural truism.
2. Being alert to product placement: by warning people that someone is trying to influence their attitudes by placing ads on, say, their favorite TV show, people become less susceptible to attitude change.
3. Resisting peer pressure: especially important in adolescence. One way is to “inoculate” teens so that they become less susceptible in engaging in, say, smoking.

Question 19

Reactance theory

Answer 19

When people feel that their freedom is threatened, an unpleasant state of reactance is aroused, and people reduce this reactance by performing the threatened behavior such as smoking.

The stronger the prohibition, the more likely people engage in prohibition.