LG 4: Attitudes Flashcards
What is an attitude and what are its three components?
Attitudes has two used definitions:
- A favourable or unfavourable evaluative reaction towards something or someone, rooted in one’s beliefs, and exhibited in one’s feelings and inclinations to act.
- A psychological tendency that is expressed by evaluating a particular entity with some degree of favor or disfavor.
ex: Entity: Ideas, Events, Objects, or People
The three components follow the ABC model
- Affect: feelings
- Behavior: inclinations to act
- Cognitive: beliefes
What is the mere exposure effect?
The mere exposure effect is the tendency for novel stimuli to be liked more or rated more positively after the rater has been repeatedly exposed to them.
So the more you are exposed to something/someone the higher the chanse of liking it.
What is evaluative conditioning?
The evaluative conditioning is how we can come to liking something through an association with something we already like or dislike. So the evaluation change after repeatedly co-occurrence with positive or negative stimuli. Is a form of classical conditioning.
Provide an example of how attitudes can form/change according to balance theory and cognitive dissonance theory (Heider; Festinger).
Cognitive dissonance theory:
Cognitive dissonance: inconsistence/tension between two cognitions, motivation to change one to reduce the tension.
- Since dissonance is uncomfortable this leads to motivation to change attitudes to reduce the dissonance.
Balance theory:
- Proposes that people will avoid having contradicting attitudes and evaluations of one object. If such inconsistency occurs, people are likely to adjust this.
What are the functions of attitudes?
The functions of attitudes is:
- Knowledge: structure the world and create a sence of structure.
Instrumental: maximize rewards, minimize negative outcomes
Ego defensive: projecting insecurities on to others and reinsurance against threat
Social function: Value-expressive: reinforcing our values by displaying them
Describe an experiment that illustrates that attitudes can be activated “automatically”.
An famous experiment that detects attitudes automatically is the “implicit association test (IAT)” which is an implicit method of measuring attitudes based on automatic association that exists between objects and concepts.
IAT: Measuring response times in conditions where some aspect of the attitude (pos.-neg. valence) is compatible versus incompatible with each other.
What is a central problems with direct (explicit) attitude measures?
A central problem with direct attitude measures is that attitudes can be quite complex, and people are therefore not necessarily actively aware of their actual attitudes, therefore indirect measurements might be better.
What factors increase the predictive value of attitudes on behavior.
when not influenced by socially expected attitudes
in planned or novel situations
when more self- conscious
