Information Processing and Behaviour Flashcards
At what 3 stages of processing do we see the effects of attitudes
Attention, encoding and memory
What did Festinger say about information processing and decision making?
We use an open-minded info search strategy before making a decision, but more selective after decision is reached
What is cognitive dissonance in relation to attitudes? What do we do as a result of it?
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
What did Knobloch-Westerwick & Meng seek to find out?
Whether attitudes influence attention on different information - Selective Exposure
How did Knobloch-Westerwick and Meng demonstrate selective exposure?
- Ptps filled out a survey on 17 attitudes and rated them in strength and favorability
- 6 weeks later asked to read whatever articles they like. The articles were titled in relation to the attitudes from the initial survey
What was the result of Knoblock-Westerwick and Meng’s study on selective exposure?
Ptps are significantly more likely to read attitude-congruent articles
What did selective exposure depend on according to Knobloch-Westerwick and Meng?
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
What was the relationship between selective exposure and self-esteem?
More likely to show SE for value relevant issues ONLY if low in self-esteem
What Attitude function does the relationship between selective exposure and self-esteem demonstrate?
Ego-defensive and value expressive
What was shown about ambivalence and certainty with selective exposure
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
What relationship did Roskos-Ewoldsen and Fazio investigate?
Highly accessible attitudes and low accessible attitudes on exposure time and attention
What did Roskos-Ewoldsen and Fazio find about object noticed and accessibility?
ptps more likely to notice in a brief exposure time the things that had a stronger and more accessible attitude towards
What did Hastorf & Cantril find about how people interpret information based on their attitudes?
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
How did Vallone, Ross and Lepper support Hastorf and Cantril’s study on interpreting info and attitudes in a more meaningful study?
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
What did Ma, Yang and Han show about attitudes and face processing for racial groups
Positive attitudes predicted faster speeds of judging orientation of faces from members of the group
What did Dotsch et al demonstrate about face processing and racial attitudes?
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
How did Proulx et al study face processing and attitudes for political attitudes?
Got progressive liberals and traditional liberals to generate a classification image for liberals and conservatives
Then asked to rate the images
What was the result of Proulx et al’s study?
Liberals rated the in-group more positively
What is another example of Proulx study using the Reverse Correlation paradigm?
Brown-Lanuzzi - welfare recipients
Ptps generated a face to be more African American
Ptps expressed more negative attitudes towards this image
When are the effects of attitudes on interpretation most prevalent? How was this demonstrated?
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
What did Eagly et al find about attitudes and memory?
There was a small congeniality effect - the tendency to remember attitude congruent info than attitude incongruent info
When was the congeniality effect of attitudes larger?
When attitude was value relevant
What did McFarland and Fletcher find about attitudes and memory?
Participants would brush their teeth more if given information about positives of brushing teeth every day.
Able to manipulate attitude
What relationship was shown between attitude ambivalence and being presented with strong/weak arguments
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
