Information Processing and Behaviour

Question 1

At what 3 stages of processing do we see the effects of attitudes

Answer 1

Attention, encoding and memory

Question 2

What did Festinger say about information processing and decision making?

Answer 2

We use an open-minded info search strategy before making a decision, but more selective after decision is reached

Question 3

What is cognitive dissonance in relation to attitudes? What do we do as a result of it?

Answer 3

A situation where our attitude is discrepant to the behaviour carried out.
We find the positives in the decision we did make and the negatives in the decision we didn’t make

Question 4

What did Knobloch-Westerwick & Meng seek to find out?

Answer 4

Whether attitudes influence attention on different information - Selective Exposure

Question 5

How did Knobloch-Westerwick and Meng demonstrate selective exposure?

Answer 5

1. Ptps filled out a survey on 17 attitudes and rated them in strength and favorability
2. 6 weeks later asked to read whatever articles they like. The articles were titled in relation to the attitudes from the initial survey

Question 6

What was the result of Knoblock-Westerwick and Meng’s study on selective exposure?

Answer 6

Ptps are significantly more likely to read attitude-congruent articles

Question 7

What did selective exposure depend on according to Knobloch-Westerwick and Meng?

Answer 7

If the article topic was
- value-relevant
- had high prior commitment to attitude
- new dissonant info wasn’t useful, high quality and non-refutable
- Attitude strength = less likely to choose counter if high certainty but would if high- accessible

Question 8

What was the relationship between selective exposure and self-esteem?

Answer 8

More likely to show SE for value relevant issues ONLY if low in self-esteem

Question 9

What Attitude function does the relationship between selective exposure and self-esteem demonstrate?

Answer 9

Ego-defensive and value expressive

Question 10

What was shown about ambivalence and certainty with selective exposure

Answer 10

The effect was dependent on whether the information was familiar or unfamiliar
Familiar info + low ambivalence = predicts pref for pro-att
Unfamiliar + high ambivalence = pro-att info

Question 11

What relationship did Roskos-Ewoldsen and Fazio investigate?

Answer 11

Highly accessible attitudes and low accessible attitudes on exposure time and attention

Question 12

What did Roskos-Ewoldsen and Fazio find about object noticed and accessibility?

Answer 12

ptps more likely to notice in a brief exposure time the things that had a stronger and more accessible attitude towards

Question 13

What did Hastorf & Cantril find about how people interpret information based on their attitudes?

Answer 13

When showed clips of an american football game of two rival unis to said uni students;
Students from Uni A would more likely see infractions committed by Uni B and vise versa

What they perceived to happen was dependent on who they supported i.e their attitudes

Question 14

How did Vallone, Ross and Lepper support Hastorf and Cantril’s study on interpreting info and attitudes in a more meaningful study?

Answer 14

Students who were Pro-Israeli or Pro-Palestine asked to review real footage of middle east
When asked impression of footage, Pro-Israeli reported more bias towards Palestines and vise versa

Question 15

What did Ma, Yang and Han show about attitudes and face processing for racial groups

Answer 15

Positive attitudes predicted faster speeds of judging orientation of faces from members of the group

Question 16

What did Dotsch et al demonstrate about face processing and racial attitudes?

Answer 16

Negative attitudes towards a racial group predicted more likely allocating face to the group if it displayed negative stereotype-relevant traits and less likely if had positive stereotype-relevant traits

Question 17

How did Proulx et al study face processing and attitudes for political attitudes?

Answer 17

Got progressive liberals and traditional liberals to generate a classification image for liberals and conservatives
Then asked to rate the images

Question 18

What was the result of Proulx et al’s study?

Answer 18

Liberals rated the in-group more positively

Question 19

What is another example of Proulx study using the Reverse Correlation paradigm?

Answer 19

Brown-Lanuzzi - welfare recipients
Ptps generated a face to be more African American
Ptps expressed more negative attitudes towards this image

Question 20

When are the effects of attitudes on interpretation most prevalent? How was this demonstrated?

Answer 20

Accessibility
Students evaluated two ‘studies’ on capitial punishment, one arguing its a good deterrent and one not
Those with pos att for capital punishment rated pro-death as superior and vise versa
BUT only occurred with ptps who had highly accessible attitudes

Question 21

What did Eagly et al find about attitudes and memory?

Answer 21

There was a small congeniality effect - the tendency to remember attitude congruent info than attitude incongruent info

Question 22

When was the congeniality effect of attitudes larger?

Answer 22

When attitude was value relevant

Question 23

What did McFarland and Fletcher find about attitudes and memory?

Answer 23

Participants would brush their teeth more if given information about positives of brushing teeth every day.
Able to manipulate attitude

Question 24

What relationship was shown between attitude ambivalence and being presented with strong/weak arguments

Answer 24

Those high in ambivalence read the articles more carefully BECAUSE they showed favourable attitudes toward the strong article
BUT Those low in ambivalence showed equal if not slightly higher favorability for the weaker article

Question 25

How did Judd and Kulik show the congeniality effect of memory in regards to unipolar attitudes

Answer 25

Extreme congruent or incongruent statements were more likely to me noticed and remembered.
Ptps shown statements varying in extremity and came back next day and had to recall
Would recall most extreme statements