Staats Chapter 31: Attitudes Established by Classical Conditioning Flashcards
Attitudes, general
“An attitude is an implicit response……which is considered socially significant in the individual’s society”
If attitudes are to be considered responses, then the learning process should be the same as for other responses… the principles of classical conditioning should apply to attitudes
The present study extends the original experiment by studying the formation of attitudes (evaluative meaning) to socially significant verbal stimuli through classical conditioning
Theory and Hypothesis
The socially significant verbal stimuli were national names and familiar masculine names
Both of these types of stimuli, unlike nonsense syllables, would be expected to evoke attitudinal responses on the basis of the pre-experimental experience of the Ss.
The purpose of the present study is to test the hypothesis that attitudes already elicited by socially significant verbal stimuli can be changed through classical conditioning using other words as unconditioned stimuli
Procedure Will take too long to read, so here’s the discussion:
It was possible to condition the attitude component of the total meaning responses of US words to socially significant verbal stimuli, without Ss’ awareness.
The national name Dutch, in this example, is presented prior to the word pretty. Pretty elicits a meaning response.
The pairing of Dutch and pretty results in associations between Dutch and rpv, and Dutch and Rp.
It should be stated that the results of the present study do not show directly that Ss’ behavior to the object (e.g., a person of Dutch nationality) has been changed.
The results pertain to the Ss’ attitudinal response to the signs, the national names themselves.
The results of this study have special relevance for an understanding of attitude formation and change by means of verbal communication.
Using a conception of meaning as a mediating response, Mowrer has suggestd that a sentence is a conditioning device and that communication takes place when the meaning response which has been elicited by the predicate is conditioned to the subject of the sentence.
The results of the present study and the previous one of the present authors, substantiate Mowrer’s approach by substantiating the basic theory that word meaning will indeed condition to contiguously presented verbal stimuli.
In the present study, the meaning component was evaluative, or attitudinal, and the CS, were socially significant verbal stimuli.
The results suggest, therefore, that attitude formation or change through communication takes place according to these principles of conditioning.
Summary
Two experiments were conducted to test the hypothesis that attitude responses elicited by a word can be conditioned to a contiguously presented socially significant verbal stimuli
In each experiment there was significant evidence that meaning responses had been conditioned to the names without Ss’ awareness
