Attitudes and Attitude Change

Question 1

What is an attitude?

Answer 1

A mental representation that summarizes an individual’s evaluation of a particular person, thing, action, group, or idea

Question 2

What are two functions of attitudes?

Answer 2

Mastery functions
Connectedness functions

Question 3

What are mastery functions?

Answer 3

Organize knowledge and guide behavior

Question 4

What are connectedness functions?

Answer 4

Express identity and impression management

Question 5

What does organizing knowledge allow us to do?

Answer 5

• Helps our organization of structures of concepts
• Guides out attention

Question 6

What does guiding behavior allow us to do?

Answer 6

What to approach and avoid

Question 7

What does expressing identity allow us to do?

Answer 7

Part of self expression

Question 8

What does impression management allow us to do?

Answer 8

• Gain acceptance into a new group
• Make a good impression

Question 9

What are the ABCs?

Answer 9

These are things that contribute to an attitude?
- Cognitive knowledge
- Behavior
- Affective emotion

Question 10

Explain the cognitive knowledge, affective emotion, and behavior towards cigarettes

Answer 10

Affective = feels disgust about cigarettes
Cognitive = knowing cigarettes are bad for you
Behavioral = Using self-perception, I move away from someone when they are smoking

Question 11

What are cognitive-based attitudes?

Answer 11

When an evaluation is based primarily on beliefs about the properties of an attitude object

Question 12

When do we use cognitive-based attitudes?

Answer 12

Especially when an object has functional use and we are trying to weight the pros and cons

Question 13

What are affective-based attitudes?

Answer 13

An attitude rooted more in emotions and values than on an objective appraisal of pros and cons

Question 14

What are behavior-based attitudes?

Answer 14

Using an evaluation of your own behavior to determine your evaluation of an attitude object

Question 15

What is the function of behavior-based attitudes?

Answer 15

Self-perception theory: People become aware of certain attitudes by observing their own behavior

Question 16

What are two aspects of attitudes?

Answer 16

Direction (positive and negative) and intensity (how likely are you to have intense emotions about something, which will gauge your preference for the attitude object)

Question 17

What are three ways to form an attitude?

Answer 17

• Systematic processing (controlled thinking)
• Superficial cues (automatic thinking)
• Conditioning (classical and operant conditioning)

Question 18

What are the steps in forming an attitude based on systematic processing?

Answer 18

• Attending to information
• Comprehending information
• Reacting to information
• Accepting or rejecting a given position

Question 19

What does systematic processing result in?

Answer 19

Creating more persistent attitudes

Question 20

What is a function of the familiarity heuristic?

Answer 20

Mere Exposure Effect: By making a stimulus accessible to an individual’s perception multiple times, it enhances the attitude towards that stimulus

Question 21

What did the Zajonc’s “language learning” study show?

Answer 21

Turkish and Chinese words shown at higher frequencies were rated higher in terms of “goodness of meaning” than words shown at lower frequencies

Question 22

What are three examples of heuristics that are superficial cue?

Answer 22

Attractiveness heuristic, expertise heuristic, and message length heuristic

Question 23

What effect is an example of an attractiveness heuristic?

Answer 23

Halo effect: When one characteristic of a person is used to make an overall judgement of that person or thing

Question 24

When do attitudes predict behavior?

Answer 24

Spontaneous behaviors (attitude accessibility: how much experience you have with something) vs. deliberate behaviors (harder to know)

Question 25

What is the theory of planned behavior?

Answer 25

Behavioral intention –> behavior
- Specific attitudes are what drives the execution of that behavior

Question 26

What does the birth control study tell us about predicting behavior?

Answer 26

The more specific something is the more it will predict a specific attitude about that behavior

Question 27

What are three things that predict behavioral intentions?

Answer 27

Attitude toward the behavior, subjective norms, perceived behavioral control (they matter but are not meant to be used uniformly: one does not have an effect size bigger than the other. it just depends on the circumstance)

Question 28

Which perspective is most closely related to the notion of behaviorally-based attitudes?

Answer 28

Self-perception theory

Question 29

Your best friend, Winona, may or may not visit New York this weekend. According to the theory of planned behavior, which information could be most useful in helping you predict whether Winona will actually travel to New York?

Answer 29

Winona’s intention to visit New York (this was the most specific option)

Question 30

What is one way to get people to change their attitude about something?

Answer 30

Effort justification –> experience cognitive dissonance and then change behavior based on changed attitude

Question 31

What are two different routes to persuasion? What model is this based on?

Answer 31

Central and peripheral routes: The Elaboration Likelihood Model

Question 32

When are people more likely to be convinced using central persuasion? What does this result in?

Answer 32

When people have the motivation and ability to pay attention: this results in more persistent attitudes

Question 33

When are people more likely to be convinced using peripheral persuasion? What does this result in?

Answer 33

When people do not have the motivation or ability to pay attention: this attitude change is more temporary

Question 34

In the elaboration likelihood model experiment which variables were manipulated for substantiative cues, superficial cues, and motivation to pay attention?

Answer 34

• Substantiative cues: argument quality (strong vs. weak)
• Superficial cues: expert vs. non-expert
• Motivation to pay attention: low vs. high

Question 35

Does mood affect attitude change?

Answer 35

Yes - bad mood leads to more systematic processing and consideration of the pros and cons while with superficial cues it lead to more comparable ratings

Question 36

How do we resist persuasion?

Answer 36

Attitude inoculation

Question 37

What does attitude inoculation do?

Answer 37

Exposing people to small doses of counter-attitudinal arguments to make them resistant to later attempts to change their attitude
- This activates threat and generates counter arguments

Question 38

Attitude inoculation is the process of making people immune to persuasion attempts by __________.

Answer 38

Exposing them to arguments against their position

Question 39

Why do persuasion attempts backfire?

Answer 39

Psychological reactance

Question 40

What is psychological reactance?

Answer 40

Freedom threatened, unpleasant state of resistance, perform behavior to reduce resistance

Question 41

What is an example of a study that represents psychological reactance?

Answer 41

Graffiti study: The stronger in force of a message was about doing graffiti the more it was vandalized