Lecture 1 - What are Attitudes?

Question 1

Allport (1935) Definition of an attitude

Answer 1

An attitude is a mental and neural state of readiness, organised through experince, exerting a directive or dynamic influence upon the individuals response to all objects and situations with which it is related
* an attitude is somhing in our head
* attitudes are guided by the things weve done, seen or read (experiences weve had)
* whatevrr our attitudes or opinions are, it changes what we think and what we d.

Question 2

Fazio (1990) Definition of an Attitude

Answer 2

An Attitude is a mental association between an object and an evaluation of it
* we have an object, we either like or dislike it
* the strength of that association can vary. Strong positive evaluation leads to a highly accessible attitude

Question 3

Zanna & Rempel (1988) Definition of an attitude

Answer 3

An attitude is an overall evaluation of an object that is based on cogntiive, affective and behavoural information
* we either like or dislike something based on thougts, emotion and behaviour

Question 4

An overall defintion of an attitude

Answer 4

An overall evaluation of an object that is based on cognitive, affective and behavioural information
* attitudes can differ in INTENSITY (weak vs stong) and VALENCE (hate or love)

Question 5

Why are attitudes important?

Answer 5

Our attitudes infleunce how we think AND what we do

Question 6

Real world importance of attitudes

Answer 6

1. Product advertising
2. Politics
3. Health
4. Environment

Question 7

Basic issues of measuring attitudes

Answer 7

• attitudes cannot be directly observed - have to ask people to report on their attitudes
• attitude measures can be explicit (direct) or implict (indirect)

Question 8

Explicit measures of Attitudes

Answer 8

Self reports
* Questionnaires in whihc Ps respond to direct questions about their opinions
* people need to think about their attitude and provide an answer

Question 9

Specific scales in sefl reports when measuring attitudes explicitly

Answer 9

Likert Scales:
* people rate the extent to which they agree or disagree with statements that express +ve or -ve sentiments toward an attitude object

e.g. strongly agree, agree, neither, disagree, strongly disagree

Question 10

Example of an Explicit measure

Answer 10

Rosenberg self esteem scale
* measuring self-esteem. Attitude towards ourselves.

Question 11

How do we end up with an explicit measure?

Answer 11

1. huge pool of items to assess the construct we are measuring (e.g. self esteem)
2. get people to look at the items and see if they CORRELATE - if they do not correlate then they must be measuring something else.
3. we then get rid of poor items to create a pool of smaller, relevant items

Question 12

What are semantic differential scales?

Answer 12

This is an explicit measure that looks at many attitudes (we ask individuals about their attitudes towards Canadians Vs French)
* semantic differential scales looks at more than one dimension (good V bad, Favourable V unfavourable, Like V dislike).
* dimensions should be correlated (if I think Canadians are good, I should think they are favourable.

From this we create one index: this person has a strong +ve attitude towards Canadians

The same semantic differential dimensions can be completed for different ibjects then we can compare favourability

Question 13

Things to consider with Explicit measures

Answer 13

• awareness of attitude (-ve)
• impression management (-ve)
• Explicit measure predict behaviour (+ve)

Question 14

Types of implicit measures

Answer 14

1. Evaluative Priming
2. Implicit association test
3. Psychophysological measures

Question 15

What is evaluative priming?

Answer 15

This is based on the notion that when we know our attitude on a topic, the attitude is highly accessible, this results in a quicker response time.

Fazio et al., (1995) used this idea as a way to come up with an implicit measure of attitudes.

Evaluative priming is examining the extent to which the prescence of an attitude primes +ve or -ve evaluations.

Question 16

Fazio et al., (1995) study design and results

Answer 16

Interested in measuring racial attitudes
Trial 1:
* Ps had to indicate if a word was +ve or -ve as quickly as possible
* they then showed another stimulus (black or white male)
* they were interested the TIME in response to
1. Black person –> +ve word
2. Black person –> -ve word
3. White person –> +ve word
4. White person –> -ve word

If someone held racial biases, response time to the +ve word ‘Wonderful’ would be inhibited (slowed down) if wonderful is preceded by a black person. Response time to the -ve word ‘annoying’ would be excited (sped up) if annoying is preceeded by a black person.

Question 17

How does the IAT work?

Answer 17

Example - Greeenwald et al., (1998), assessing gender attitudes
Phase 1:
* showing people male and female names
* istructing Ps to press a certain key for a female or male name

Phase 2:
* showing people names and +ve or -ve words
* instructing ps to press a key for a +ve or -ve word

Phase 3: first key trial
* if a male name and +ve adjective shows, press a certain key
* if a female name and -ve adjective shows, press another key

Phase 4: reverse the adjectives
* if a male name or -ve adjective comes up, press one key
* if a female name or +ve adjective comes up, press another key

If things are compatable, they should be fast

Question 18

Issues of IAT

Answer 18

• you can fake IAT’s BUT there are tools in place to control this
• always a relativity
• you get a distibution of scores - you then use these scores to predict another outcome
• Olsen & Fazio (2004): what do IAT’s measure? implicit measure or cultural associations?

Question 19

Overcoming the issues of an IAT

Answer 19

Due to the fact that IAT’s may be measuring cultural associations, we should have something in place that measures personal associations:
* Alternative scoring algorithms (Greenwald et al., 2003)
* IAT scores can have substantive effects (Greenwald et al., 2015)

Question 20

Using physiological measures as an IAT

Answer 20

EMG has been used to assess individuals Implicit measures of attitudes.
* measures electrical activity in the zygomatic and corrugator muscles in the face (smiling and frowning).
* different types of muscles move depending on like or dislike.

Reliability issues!!

Question 21

What is Reliability

Answer 21

• The degree to which test scores are free from errors in measurement
• How good/how well did they measure the same thing?

Question 22

What is internal consistency?

Answer 22

Whether the individual items in a measure are assessing the same construct. Often assessed using Cronbach’s Alpha

Question 23

What is Test-retest reliability?

Answer 23

Consistency in scores accross time, often assessed using pearsons correlation
* explicit measures show evidence of greater test-retest reliability (Gawronski et al., 2017)

Question 24

What is Validity?

Answer 24

• The extent that a scale assesses the constrict it is designed to measure
• How well does it measure what it is meant to be measuring?

Question 25

What is convergent validity?

Answer 25

When something is related to other measures of the same contruct
* e.g. our new measure of self-esteem gives similar results to an old, accepted measure of self-esteem

Question 26

What is Discriminant Validity?

Answer 26

This is when our measure is unrelated to measures of irrelevant constructs
* e.g. our new measure of self-esteem does not correlate/ isnt related to scores on a about physical health - checking that other constructs are unrelated

Question 27

Predictive validity

Answer 27

predictive of the future

Question 28

Strong attitudes are…

Answer 28

1. stable over time
2. resistant to change
3. likely to influence information processing
4. likely to guide behaviour

Question 29

What are the three properties of an attitude

Answer 29

1. Content
2. Structre
3. Function

Question 30

Content of an attitude

Answer 30

This explains what leads to an attitude:
* Cognitions (how I think about my attitudes)
* Affect (How does a certain thing make you feel?)
* Behaviours (actions of others or yourself may inform a certain view)

C, A and B all contribute to our attitude. Mostly CAB are related. But, these things are not completely redundant (blood donation example)

Question 31

How can we measure content of an attitude?

Answer 31

We can measure the cognitive and affect aspects of an attitude through:
semantic differential scales
COGNITION: useful-useless, valuable-worthless
AFFECT: delighted-sad, relaxed-angry

We can measure cognitive, affective and behavioural aspects of an attitude through:
thought listing - people list and evaluate their…
1. thoughts about the attitude object
2. feelings about the attitude object
3. behaviour towards the attitude object

Behaviour is more open ended. We can ask people.

Question 32

Are Cogntion, Affect and Behaviour the same?

Answer 32

NO.
* When you measure these things, they emerge separate from eachother in factor analysis. They arent redundant to eachother (Breckler, 1984 showed this)
* They correlate with eachother but they arent the same

Question 33

Evidence that Cognition, Affect and Behaviour are not the same

Answer 33

Using a regression analysis we can see that these three things independently predict an attitude to different degrees.
* There is a lot of evidence that they are related but independent

People differ in how much their attitudes are guided by cognitive and affective information

Question 34

Structure of an attitude

Answer 34

Unidimensional view
Bidimensional view

Question 35

What is the Unidimensional View?

Answer 35

Unidimensional view:
* attitudes toward something are +ve or -ve.
* we ask people ot evaluate an object along a line, youre eithe rone or the other.
* neutral represents two things, either you dont care or you dont know

Question 36

What is the Bidimensional view?

Answer 36

Bidimensional view:
* this is when you tease the negative apart from the positive. Objects can reflect varying amounts of positivity and negativity towards an object.
* people can evaluate objects on both +ve and -ve dimension
* bidimensional views allow us to measure the ambivalence (not good at all/not bad at all is different to extrememly good and extremely bad

Question 37

Kaplan (1972) comments on the bidimensional view

Answer 37

This measure can assess
* each dimension seperately
* overall attitudes
* ambivalent (mixed) attitudes

Question 38

Implications of the Bidimensional view

Answer 38

Ambivalence is linked with how much attention we devote to relevant information - if its something were conflicted on, we will spend more time on it.

Question 39

Windsor-Shellard & Haddock (2014) - evidence of the usefulness of the bidimensional view

Answer 39

Looking at peoples potential ambivalence about their own sexual orientation and looking at the implications of that. So this bidimensional view allows us to get a sense of ambivalence and why that might be important

Question 40

The function of an attitude

Answer 40

What do attitudes do for us?

Question 41

Seminal Theory (Smith et al., 1956)

Answer 41

The Psychological needs that attitudes fulfil
1. object appraisal - attitude helps with daily life - knowing what we like and dont like (this has been seen as the primary function)
2. social-adjustive fucntion - holding an attitude based on those around you. Helps to navigate your social network
3. Externalisation - attitudes protects us from oursleves - not liking gold because we are bad at it.

Question 42

Seminal Theory (Katz 1960)

Answer 42

Proposed another set of taxonomies showing the functions of an attitude. They explained that the 4 primary functions of an attitude are:
1. Knowledge (links to object apprisal - having an attitude gives us knowledge that we can use to navigate the social world
2. Utilitarian (links to object appraisal)
3. Ego defence (links to externalisation - i might not like something because theres someone we know who dosnt like it and that makes you feel good about yourself
4. Value-expression - attitudes I hold may express my core values

Question 43

How do we measure the functions of an attitude?

Answer 43

1. Self-report measurement (e.g. Attitude function inventory - a self report questionnaire with items assessing functions of attitudes toward an attitude object

not a very strong SR

Question 44

Individual differences in the functions of an attitude

Answer 44

Snyder & DeBono (1985):
* high self monitors: sees oneself as a flexible and adaptive individual. People who might change the way they present themselves for one group compared to another
* low self monitors: sees onself as a person who values consistency between behaviour and internal values, attitudes and dispositions (how they think about themselves and present themselves remains constant)

These researchers found that those high in self monitoring, are more likely to fulfil the social adjustive function. Whereas individuals low in self-monitoring were more consistent, their attitues may be more value expressive in nature

Question 45

Object appraisal function of an attitude

Answer 45

Object appraisal is a primary need that is fulfilled by an attitude. Knowing if we like ot dislike something helps us
* accetable attitudes serve an orienting function

Question 46

LaPierre (1934)

Answer 46

Travelled with a young Chinese couple. At the time America was heavily anti-Asian. He wondered if they would be refused service - they weren’t. After the travelling he sent letters to the establishments asking if they would refuse to serve Asian individuals, in which they all indicated they would - gap between attitudes and behaviour.
* methodological issues with this study