Week Eight Flashcards
attitude
an attitude is a relatively enduring organisation of beliefs, feelings and behavioural tendencies toward socially significant objects, groups, events or signals.
Operational definition: a general disposition to respond to an object in a favourable or unfavourable way.
implications of attitudes
- Attitudes define a person’s position towards a given aspect of their social world.
- Attitudes are relatively stable
- Three different components of attitudes.
a. Cognitive
b. Affective - feeling
c. Behavioural
Attitudes directed towards socially significant stimuli.
direct attitude measures
- Open ended questions
○ Advantages: simple, lots of data
○ Disadvantages: time consuming, differences in expressiveness.- Closed questions (e.g. likert, semantic differential scales)
○ Advantages: easy, quick
○ Disadvantages: response sets.
§ People may circle all 7’s thus it is not valid.
- Closed questions (e.g. likert, semantic differential scales)
indirect attitude measures
- Participants unaware that attitude being assessed (lost letter technique)
○ Lost contentious letters and found that people picked up and mailed letters that were addressed to more socially acceptable organisations.- Physiological measures (pupil dilation, fMRI etc.)
- Duping the participant (bogus pipeline).
○ Participants were hooked up to what they thought was a lie detector and assessed what people really think about a specific issue. - Cognitive research methods (implicit association)
○ If you have a favourable attitude towards something, you’re more likely to connect stimuli faster. - Overt behaviour
○ Studies that analyse who people sit with/associate with etc.
LaPiere (1934)
§ Research travelled with a Chinese couple in the US, and assessed how many establishments responded to Chinese guests. In general, behaviours were very positive and they were only rejected once. However, he later sent a survey asking the establishments whether they would accept Chinese guests, and the majority was no. thus, found that there was a discrepancy between attitude and behaviour.
TRA
- Theory of reasoned action (Fishbein & Ajzen, 1975).
○ Intention: a subjective estimate of the probability that one will perform a certain behaviour
○ Attitude: how favourable or unfavourable a person feels towards the behaviour.
○ Subjective norm: perceived social pressure to perform or not perform the behaviour.
TPB
○ Perceived behavioural control (PBC)- perceived ease and control over performing or not performing the behaviour.
attitude change
- Two models of attitude change
a. Elaboration likelihood model of persuasion
b. Heuristic-systematic model- Behaviour-induced attitude change
a. Cognitive dissonance theory
- Behaviour-induced attitude change
yale studies
- Communicator (where is the message coming from).
- Message
- Channel
- Audience
communicators
- Credibility of the source
○ Bochner and Insko (1966)
§ Focused on understanding credibility. Looked at whether people could be persuaded to change their attitudes about the amount of sleep we need per day. Looked at a high credibility source and a low credibility source.○ The sleeper effect. § Sleeper effect states that over time we forget the credibility of the source and thus attitudes stabilise. § The source becomes less important overtime.
attractiveness of the commuunicator
(DeBono & Telesca, 1990).
○ Side of women attractive or made to look unattractive.
○ Strong and weak message
○ Attractive source related in stronger message attitude.
○ Strongest is a strong message delivered by an attractive source.
message
- Fear
○ Inverted U
§ Curvilinear relationship between fear and attitude change.
§ A certain amount of fear would achieve persuasion.
§ Difficult to identify optimal level of fear- other factors may need to be considered as influencing the fear-persuasion relationship.
§ Males are more likely to say that others would be more influenced by fear based messaging.
§ Women stated that they were more likely to be influenced than others.
Protection Motivation theory (Rogers, 1983).
- Motivation to protect oneself from health threat influenced by
○ Severity of event
○ Probability of event
○ Response efficacy
○ Self efficacy beliefs.
Fear vs Humour
- Humour vs fear based approaches - Relative effectiveness of humour for males - Need to ensure that the humour is appropriate but cannot be tied to serious consequences.
channel
- Message medium
- Source effects may depend on the channel.
- Complex messages are more beneficial when written
audience
- Intelligence- depends on message complexity
- High intelligence is persuaded more by complex, sound messages.
- Self esteem (curvilinear= low self esteem unlikely to be persuaded, high self esteem unlikely as well).
- Mood; influences message processing
○ Good mood = more likely to be persuaded (peripheral cues- already in a good mood and don’t want to change that (fear based messages unlikely to work).
models of persuasion
- Elaboration likelihood model (petty & Cacioppo).
○ Central vs peripheral route.
○ Key determinant is the elaboration - how likely are we to may attention or think the message applies to us.- Heuristic-systematic model (chaiken)
○ Systematic vs heuristic processing
- Heuristic-systematic model (chaiken)
