Lecture 1: Reading Flashcards
History of attitudes
-Trace back to 20th C
-LaPiere: Research into US attitudes toward Asian community
-Adorno et al (1950) - Development of F-Scale (fascism) - why people develop authoritarian or anti-Semitic views
-Ajzen & Fishbein (1977) - Theory of Reasoned Action; predict deliberative and thoughtful behaviour from attitudes.
What is the Equal Appearing Interval Method (Thustone, 1929)
This kind of scale is used to measure people’s attitude towards a fairly clear and unidimensional concept, using a number of statements that vary in how they express a positive or negative opinion about the main concept
- Researcher constructs a set of belief statements relevant to the attitude
- Order statements along a scale containing intervals. Imply levels of favorability or unfavorability towards the topic
- Participants indicate items they agree with.
What is the affect misattribution paradigm?
Paradigm which explores the unconscious attitudes and values of individuals
People tend to misattribute their current feelings to salient (noticeable) stimuli - People rate more positively following objects that are pleasant than unpleasant
Measures automatically activated responses based on the misattributions people make about the sources of their affect or cognitions
The affect misattribution procedure (AMP) measures automatically activated responses based on the misattributions people make about the sources of their affect or cognitions
The AMP is one of the most widely used implicit attitude measures, and evidence regarding its reliability and validity has grown rapidly
Physiological measures used with attitude measures
Skin response, pupillary dilation, facial electromyographic activity (facial EMG)
Event-related Potentials: ERPS
Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI)
What is the content specific approach? (Crites et al., 1994)
Developed different sematic differential measures of cognitive & affective components of attitude - measure dimensions such as useful/useless, pleasant/unpleasant
What is the evaluative lexicon? (Rocklage & Fazio., 2015)
A novel approach to assessing the valence, extremity, and basis of attitudes
Examines individuals’ use of adjectives when evaluating an object
The Evaluative Lexicon indexes whether an attitude is based on affect or cognition
E.g. “Smart” codes for cognitive
This approach has potential use for large scale application
Research showing that CAB components DO predict attitudes?
Ableson et al., (1982) asked ppts to indicate attitude to Democratic & Republican canidates
- Favourability of affective responses correlated with ppts attitudes towards canidates - cognitive & affective info help to predict political attitudes
Breckler (1984) found affect was found to best predict attitudes toward abortion & comprehensive exams
Esses et al., (1993) conducted series of studies assessing relative importance of cognitive & affective info in prejudicial attitudes
Found correlations between participants overall attitudes & affective responses were both important for predicting prejudice
What is objective ambivalence?
The presence of both strong positive and negative evaluations toward an object (conflict)
between OR within components (CAB components)
may/may not be consciously perceived by the individual
What is subjective ambivalence?
conscious and direct experience of evaluative conflict
actual feeling that ppl experience when thinking about an object
What is meant by attitudes are acquired behavioural dispositions?
Campbell, 1963: Defined as states of the person that come into being on the basis of some transaction with the environment
Attitudes do not exist until an individual perceives an attitude object
& responds to it
Buller, 2005: Responses can be influenced by predispositions or initial biases that direct attention to the stimuli that makes up the attitude object
What are ephemeral contextual factors?
Change in attitudes over time, varying around a value that reflects the inner tendency
an inner tendency to judge or evaluate something or someone either positively or negatively
What is latent attitudinal tendency? (attitude structure)
An attitude is a deposited from an individual’s past experiences with the attitude object
What is neo-triparte tendency?
Different types of inputs to attitudes can be represented in memory as mental associations linked to the attitude object
Mental associations between attitude objects and positive negative experiences form based on prior experience
This association could’ve taken place in the form of cognitive, affective, or behavioural responding
What are the structural properties of mental associations?
Intra-attitudinal structure refers to the structure of a single attitude
Inter-attitudinal structure refers to structures involving more than one attitude
