Definitions & Measures Flashcards
What was Allport’s (1935) definition of Attitudes?
A mental and neural state of readiness, organized through experience, exerts a directive or dynamic influence upon an individual’s response to all objects and situations with which it is related
IE. Something in our head, some kind of evaluation. guided by things we’ve done, seen or read. It influences what we do
What is Fazio’s (1990) definition of Attitudes?
A mental association between an object and our evaluation of it
Strong automatic link
If an attitude has a strong link between the object and the evaluation, how accessible is it?
Highly accessible
What is Zanna and Rampel’s (1989) definition of attitudes?
Am overall evaluation of an attitude object that is based on cognitive, affective and behavioural information
What is Eagly and Chaiken’s definition of attitudes?
A psychological tendency that is expressed by evaluating a particular entity with a degree of favor or disfavor
What two ways can an attitude vary? What do they mean?
Intensity/Strength: Stability over time and withstand persuasive appeals
Valence: Positive vs negative
Give 4 reasons why attitudes are important
Attitude appraisal function - Serve as energy saving devices to make judgements easily and quickly
Express attitudes
Identify who we like
Protect selves from negative feedback
Why is knowing the primary function of an attitude important when wanting to change someone’s attitude?
More likely to be successful
What did Wicker say about attitudes predicting behaviour? How did Fishbein and Azjen counter this?
Wicker -Attitudes aren’t good predictors of behaviour
Fishbein and Azjen - Its about HOW and WHEN attitudes predict behaviour = some conditions are better than others
What is evaluative conditioning?
The repeated exposure of an attitude object paired with an affective sensation comes to elicit an evaluation of the attitude object
Name two explicit measures of attitudes
Likert scale and Semantic differential scale
How does a Likert scale measure attitudes?
Rate the extent to which they agree or disagree with statements that express either a positive or negative sentiments about an attitude object
How does a Semantic Differential Scale measure attitudes?
People rate attitudes based on several bipolar adjective scales (E.g Bad vs good, unfavourable vs favourable)
What are the issues with explicit measures of attitudes?
Awareness of attitude
Social desirability/filtered responses
Presentation of question = diff responses
Diff responses if question invites person to rate attitudes based on others
What are explicit measures shown to do?
Predict behaviours
How is the Equal Appearing Intervals Method used to create an attitude scale?
- A set of belief statements relevant to attitude is presented
- Judges are asked to order statements along an interval scale
- Give set of statements to sample being tested
How do implicit measures measure attitudes?
By looking at speed of judgements
Why is it important to look at speed of judgements?
Cognitive processes make it easier to interpret the meaning of an object that shares the same meaning as an object seen rather than comparing completely unrelated items
Name 4 implicit measures of attitudes
Evaluative priming, IAT, Affect misattribution paradigm psychophysiological measures
How does Evaluative priming measure attitudes?
Based on the accessibility of attitude
Measures the extent to which the presence of an attitude primes positive vs negative evaluations
- When a word comes up have to indicate if positive or negative
- Shown brief stimulus on one of the trails
- Interested in reaction time
How does an IAT measure attitudes?
- Build association in first two blocks (E.g Males vs Females, positive vs negative words)
- Block 3 = Combine first two blocks so they are congruent with attitude to measure mean response latency which should be fast (E.g Males & Positive words, Females & negative words)
- Final Block is incongruent with attitude and response should be slower (E.g Males & Negative words, Females & positive words)
How can the IAT be made child friendly?
- Allow more time to respond
- Words more prominent in child’s vocab (e.g Yucky)
- Words spoken aloud
- Bright buttons rather than keyboard
Give an example of a study that used child IATs
Baron and Banaji (2006) - used a race IAT on 6 - 10 year olds
Found 6 y/os had strong explicit and implicit pro-white/anti-black attitudes
10 y/o were positive towards African Americans explicitly but not implicitly
What are the criticisms of IATs?
Responses have been shown to be malliable - use of liked black and disliked white individuals (Dasgupta and Greenwald, 2001)
With training people can exert control over responses
Is it prejudice or do they just favour one over the other but still like both?
Attitudes can be affected by extrapersonal associations (if partner likes something they will like it too)
Personal associations or cultural associations?
How can we overcome the criticisms of IATs?
Use something that measures more personal than general
Alt scoring algorithm
How does the Affect Misattribution Paradigm (AMP) measure attitudes?
Derives from evaluative priming
- Shown images of attitude object and ambiguous object (e.g Chinese writing character)
- Asked to quickly rate pleasantness of ambiguous character and ignore all other objects before it
- Shown pleasant object before = rate amb. objects more pleasantly and vise versa
Name psychophysiological measures that can be used to measure attitudes and their issues
Pupillometry - Less sensitive to valence and more to the attention the individual devotes to the object
Galvanic skin response - cannot differentiate valence
Electromyographic activity (muscle response) - Addresses valence issue but practical limitations
How do explicit measures fair in terms of reliability and validity
High reliability (test-retest)
SDS - high internal consistency and high validity (predictive)
Likert - highly predictive (validity)
How do implicit measures fair in terms of reliability and validity?
relatively high internal and test-retest correlations
Convergent and predictive validity
What can implicit measures do that explicit measures cannot?
predict variability in behaviour
What are strong attitudes more likely to be?
Stable over time
Resistant to change
Likely to influence info processing
Likely to guide behaviour
