Lecture 6 - Attitudes

Question 1

What is an attitude?

Answer 1

A learned association between the representation and the affective experience

Question 2

What are the 3 components of attitudes?

Answer 2

• Cognition: the thought component
• Affect: the feeling component
• Behaviour: the action component

Question 3

What are the 3 ways attitudes are formed?

Answer 3

• Mere exposure (Zajonc)
• Insrumental and classical conditioning
• Reason and logic: The theory of reasoned action (Ajzen & FIshbein, 1980)

Question 4

What is Zanjonc’s mere exposure theory?

Answer 4

Being exposed to the presence of something leads you to feel more positively about it e.g. the more exposed they were to the Chinese character, the more positively they felt towards it. The mere exposure effect is more stringer when the participants are not aware that they have been exposed to the images

Question 5

What is instrumental conditioning?

Answer 5

Learning in which behaviours become more or less probable depending on their consequences

Question 6

What is classical conditioning?

Answer 6

Learning through association

Question 7

What is the Olson and Fazio classical conditioning study?

Answer 7

• Classically conditioned attitudes towards African American men
• Preceded a presentation with an African American face with an unconditioned stimulus (something participants should have an automatic positive or negative feeling about)
• If the male is associated with the skull, people would tend to have slightly more negative attitudes

Question 8

Implicit attitude measurement of the Olson and Fazio study

Answer 8

• Shows the African American man and then follows that with positive or negative trait words that you have to decide whether the word is positive or negative
• If you have been primed with the African American, then you would have a faster time recognizing the negative words and slower time recognizing the positive words

Question 9

An associative network model of emotion for the Olson and Fazio study

Answer 9

If you have a negative attitude towards African Americans, and they show you a picture, that picture should prime the other negative things in your network and so words that are associated with negative should be easier to be identified

Question 10

Reasons and logic: The theory of reasoned action (Ajzen & Fishbein, 1980)

Answer 10

• Attitudes are like a cold computation of the beliefs about outcomes and evaluation of outcomes
• More cognitive route towards the creation of attitudes

Question 11

LaPierre’s (1934) study, attitudes towards Chinese individuals

Answer 11

• Traveled around the USA with a Chinese couple when the USA had negative attitudes towards Chinese immigrants
• LaPierre was not that confident that he would be accepted and well received in all places they went t such as restaurants etc.
• Turns out people accepted them but he wrote to them afterwards and asked if they accepted Chinese people and most of them said no we do not
• There are big discrepancies between what people would do and what they say they would do