W6: Attitudes Flashcards
What is an attitude?
Evaluation of an object or behavior in a positive or negative way
(like/dislike, agree/disagree)
What is the tripartite view of attitudes?
Affect: emotional reactions to an attitude object (e.g. i love coffee)
Behaviour: knowledge about interactions with an attitude object (i drink it everyday)
Cognition: thoughts about the attitude subject (it wakes me up)
How do you measure attitudes?
- Explicit: self-reports
- Likert Scale (With the Likert scale, people state how much they agree or disagree with a particular statement)
- Semantic Differential scales (with the semantic differential scale, people fill in the questionnaire to decide how much of a trait or quality the item has.)
- easy to write and administer, but prone to social desirability and may not capture a lot of things (e.g. perceptual fluency) - Implicit
A. IAT (Implicit Attitudes Test which tests response latency - time taken needed to respond)
- can indicate attitude accessibility and less prone to social desirability
- difficult to administer, may not tell the full story (confound: cognition)
B. non verbal measures
- sitting far away/close to object
- physiological measures
Why doesn’t attitude always lead to behaviour?
- other powerful determinants of behaviour
- power of the situation (e.g. good samaritan study, milgram, social norms) - inconsistent attitude components
- ambivalent attitudes: affective and cognitive components of attitudes may conflict (e.g. bbt) - inaccurate attitudes from introspection
- students’ overall relationships more accurately predicted if they did not introspect
- reasons that are easy to come up with may not be the true reasons that underlie your feelings towards your partner
- introspection more accurate when it is cognitive-based than affective-based - general vs specific attitudes
- attitudes can be broad, but behaviours are specific (e.g. doing good vs donations)
- when attitudes and behavior are at the same level of specificity, attitudes are better predictors of behavior
What is the cognitive dissonance theory?
Inconsistency between thoughts, feelings, actions create an aversive state known as dissonance.
- this aversive feeling makes us want to restore consistency
- we will change whatever is easiest to reduce dissonance and restore consistency
When does cognitive dissonance typically occur?
- Post-Decision Dissonance: after deciding between two or more alternatives
- Effort Justification: after going through a lot of effort to do something (hazing)
- Induced (forced) Compliance: after being induced to behave in a way that doesn’t match your beliefs, attitudes or values
Why does inconsistency due to forced compliance lead to dissonance?
- Choice (When the behavior is freely chosen (e.g., agreeing to lie), more dissonance is experienced.)
- Insufficient justification (The less incentive (e.g., $1 to lie) that someone has for performing an attitude-inconsistent behavior, the more dissonance is experienced.)
- Negative consequences (When the behavior does not result in any negative consequences, less dissonance is experienced.)
- Foreseeability (If the negative consequences of a behavior could not have been predicted or avoided, less dissonance is experienced.)
CINF
When do rewards backfire?
Over-Justification effect
- If you want to persuade people to engage in a behavior for the right reasons, provide as little incentive/coercion as possible (make them feel dissonance!)
Is dissonance universal?
Spreading of alternatives theory
What is the self-perception theory?
A rival to cognitive dissonance theory.
According to this theory, we don’t experience dissonance and we don’t change our attitudes.
People come to know their own attitudes by looking at their behavior and the context in which it occurred and inferring what their attitudes must be.
Example: I just donated to the SPCA… I guess I care about animal rights!
How do dissonance and self-perception differ?
Differ in processes involved: attitude change (from dissonance) vs attitude inferred
What is the misattribution of arousal paradigm at play here?
Manipulated attributions of arousal led to different amounts of attitude change—arousal matters!
How do both work together?
Cognitive dissonance: when the way we behave is inconsistent with pre-existing, clear, important attitudes (clear reason to feel uncomfortable/aroused)
Self-Perception: when we don’t have a clear, solidified attitude (e.g. we are ambivalent) or when the attitude isn’t important (weak), therefore no clear reason to feel uncomfortable/aroused.
What are other broader rationalization theories?
System Justification Theory
When people believe that the world should be fair, but witness inequality, this creates dissonance
Protest is hard, but justification is easy so you justify the system and say that it is indeed fair
Women and low-income groups justify the system more.
