attitudes Flashcards
(38 cards)
what is attitude?
an association in memory between an object and an evaluation, about people, objects, events and abstract ideas
attitudes comes from mainly 2 areas. what are they?
- genetic basis
- social experiences
genes and social experiences shape __________ and __________ which affect our attitudes directly.
temperament; personality
what 3 components make up attitude?
- affective (evaluations based on physiological responses, emotions and associations)
- behavioural (evaluations based on outcomes of behaviours)
- cognitive (evaluations based on rationality, logic, facts, pros and cons)
which one of the 3 components that make up attitudes, affective, behavioural or cognitive, makes evaluations based on physiological responses, emotions and associations?
affective
define affectively-based attitude.
attitude based on emotions and physiological reactions, not on past behaviours or object assessments of pros and cons.
where do affectively based attitudes come from? (4 sources)
- values
- physiological reactions (taste or touch something you either like or don’t like)
- aesthetic reasons
- classical and operant conditioning
define behaviourally-based attitude.
attitude based on observations of how one behaves toward an object in the past.
which one of the 3 components that make up attitude, affective, behavioural or cognitive, revisits self-perception and cognitive dissonance? how so?
behavioural.
- we resort to behaviourally-based attitudes by looking to our past actions when we are unclear about our attitudes and need to justify them.
- we are unclear about out attitudes when:
- attitudes are weak/ambiguous (eg. if strong attitude towards exercising already exists, there is no need to look to past behaviour)
- attitudes are remotely relevant to us
- there is no extrinsic justification for behaviour (if i’m exercising for a medical reason, there’s no need to look back to past actions for justification)
attitudes that are based on rationality, logical analysis of facts and weighing of pros and cons is called ____________-based attitude.
cognitively
are most decisions and evaluations in our life based on rationality?
no. gut feeling.
explicit vs implicit attitudes
explicit attitude: attitudes that we consciously endorse, and can easily think and talk about.
implicit attitude: attitudes that are involuntary, uncontrollable and sometimes beyond our conscious awareness.
what is the example of explicit vs implicit attitudes given in the lecture?
- explicit
- sam thinks racism is wrong.
- racial equality exists in the form of explicit attitude because it is his conscious evaluation of other races and it explains how he chooses to act.
- consistent with his explicit attitude, he steps up to defend a person from racism at the park.
- implicit
- sam thinks racism is wrong, but he grew up wiht negative stereotypes about minority groups.
- racial inequality exists in the form of implicit attitude because racist ideas might have affected sam in ways he is unaware of and he could have picked up mental associations between minorities and badness unintentionally as he grew up.
- consistent with his implicit attitude, sam intuitively assumes a masked burglar belongs to a minority group without any evidence.
which attitude, implicit or explicit, can be measured directly?
explicit
explicit attitudes can be measured directly, but they are prone to many problems. name 2.
for implicit attitudes measurements, are these problems also present? why?
- unwilling to report because of embarrassment, privacy, social desirability.
- unable to do so because the attitude of interest could be weak, ambigous and thus prone to poor self-inspection.
measuring implicit attitudes do not have the same problems because they are mental structures in our mind that we are not even aware of.
what is the most common indirect measure of implicit attitudes?
Implicit Association Test (IAT)
what is the main thing about Implicit Association Test (IAT)?
strength of association between 2 mental representations reflected by reaction time.
- how quickly or slowly you link 2 concepts together (eg. if rxn is faster in pairing fruits with negative words vs good words, implicit attitude towards fruits is negative)
what are 2 pros of the Implicit Association Test (IAT)?
- relies on rxn time - hard to fake
- purpose of task not obvious to typical participants
what is a con of the Implicit Association Test (IAT)?
what you really like vs cultural norms
eg. faster association of japanese food with happy face may not necessarily mean i like japanese food more, maybe it is just more common in my culture compared to italian food.
give 3 reasons why people change their attitudes.
- in response to self-examination (coping with dissonance)
- inspection of apast behaviours (self-perception)
- direct social influence
A persuasion method is the Yale attitude change approach and it can be summarised in 1 line. what is that line?
who says what to whom
what are the 3 main factors of the Yale attitude change approach?
- source of communication (speaker who looks appealing, credible, confident and convey message in slow and deep voice)
- message itself (quality of argument, presentation of both sides of issue, length and vividness of message)
- nature of audience (intelligence, age, self-esteem, distraction)
what is the problem with the Yale model?
numerous variables/factors all over the place
(eg. attractiveness of conveyor, quality of argument, age of recipient, etc.)
what was done to counter the problem with the Yale model?
process-driven theory to account for the numerous variables/factors with the least complexity.
Elaboration Likelihood Model (ELM) - an explanation that persuasive communications can cause attitude change via 2 ways, depending on motivation and ability of the message recipient.
