Attitudes Flashcards
What are attitudes?
A mental state of readiness that exerts influence on an individual’s response to objects and situations to which it is related (Allport, 1935)
▪ A relatively enduring set of beliefs, feelings and intentions towards an object, person, event or symbol (Eagly & Chaiken, 1993; Pratkanis et al., 1989)
▪ Structure of interrelated beliefs that reside in long-term memory (LTM) that are activated when objects or situations that related are encountered (Tourangeau & Rasinski, 1988)
▪ Experiences that involve an evaluation of someone or something (Eiser, 1980).
What are the componats of an attitude?
One component: affect (evaluation) for or against a psychological object (Thurstone, 1931)
▪ Two components: consists of a mental readiness to act, and guides evaluative responses (Allport, 1935)
▪ Three components: consist of the affective, behavioural and cognitive components (thought, feeling, and action)
What are the function of attitudes accroding to Katz (1960)
▪ Katz (1960)
➢ Knowledge (provide meaningful, structured environment)
➢ Instrumentality (means to an end or goal)
➢ Ego defence (protecting one’s self-esteem)
➢ Value expressiveness (allowing people to display those values that uniquely identify and define them)
explain the socio-cognitive model of attitudes
Highlights an evaluative component
▪ Knowledge of an object is represented in memory along with a summary of how to appraise that object ▪ Attitude: “a person’s evaluation of an object or thought”
Label of an object,rules of application –>makes sense of the world , help to deal with the environment
evaluative summery –> Heuristic- a simple strategy for appraisal
supportive knowledgestructure –> schematic-organsies and guides memory for events and actions
e.g. label: shark, big fish with teeth
rules: lives in sea
evaluative summery: frightening, best avoided if swimming
knowledge structure: a well documented threat to our physical well-being ( both in science and fiction.)
How do attitudes form according to socialisation?
Attitudes are learned rather than innate: socialisation process (Fishbein & Ajzen, 1975)
▪ Direct experience (positive or negative) e.g. less exposure = more discrimination
➢ Mere exposure effect
➢ Classical conditioning
➢ Instrumental conditioning
➢ Social Learning Theory
➢ Self-perception Theory
Explain the mere exposure effect
Mere-exposure effect (Zajonc, 1968): repeated exposure to an object results in greater attraction to that object
Explain the classical condition explanation to attitude formation
Classical Conditioning (Staats, 1957; Zanna et al., 1970): repeated association of a formerly neutral stimulus can elicit a reaction that was previously elicited by another stimulus
explain the instrumental conditioning to attitude formation
Instrumental Conditioning (Kimble, 1961): responses which yield positive outcomes or eliminate negative outcomes are strengthened
explain social learning theory explaantion to attitude formation
Observational learning (Bandura, 1973): Attitude formation is a social learning process. In modelling, one person’s behaviour is modelled by another
explain self-perception theory as an explaantion for attitude formation
Self-perception (Bem, 1972): our attitudes are informed byour behaviour and making internal attributions for that behaviour
▪ “Why did I do that?”
How are attitudes measured?
Thurstone’s scale of equal appearing intervals
▪ Guttman’s scalagram (uni-dimensional)
▪ Osgood’s semantic differential (meaning given to a word)
▪ Likert’s method of summated ratings
Explain Thrstone’s methods of equal appearing intervals
Thurstone’s scale
▪ More than 100 statements ranging from extremely favourable to extremely hostile
- e.g., statements that describe attitudes towards war
- “I would refuse to participate in any way in war”
- “I would immediately go to war and would do everything in my power to influence others to do the same”
- “I would support my country even against my convictions”
- “I would not go to war, unless I was drafted”
Judges order statements and put them into 11 categories (1 being least favourable to 11 being most)
2 statements selected from each category wit hthe highest inter-rater realiability
administer 22 statements to ppts with agree/disagree format
average the sum of agreed statements
explain guttmans scale
contains either favourable or unfavourable statements arranged in a ahierarchy - measures single, unidimensional trait
Intems are ordered high t olow accordingly so in order to agree with a statemnet at the bottom, all prior ones have to be agreed with.
Osgood’s semantic differential
Doesn’t measure opinions but evaluations of an object/person on a set of semnatic scales
Likert scales
scales that measure a persons agreement/disagreement with something
give some strengths to likert scales
▪ Strengths
▪ Convenience
▪ Gives standardised measure
▪ Comparable scores
▪ Can have a range of positive and negative items (acquiescence bias)
Can you think of any problems with measuring attitudes this way?
Give osme weaknesses to Likert scales
▪ Weaknesses
▪ Can force people to agree/disagree with ideas that may not correspond with how they see things
▪ Can provide information on the ordering of people’s attitudes on a continuum, but is unable to indicate how close or far apart the different attitude might be
▪ Social desirability
Outline psychological measures for testing attitide agrreableness
Physiological measures
▪ Skin resistance, heart rate, and pupil dilation (Rankin & Campbell, 1955; Westie & DeFleur, 1959; Hess, 1965).
▪ Procedure: compare a physiological reading taken in the presence of a neutral object, with one taken in the presence of the attitude object
▪ What are some of the problems you can think of associated with physiological measures of attitudes?
How do attitudes change?
What we feel may not necassarily be related to what we think
the thought/ feeling componant may not predict our behaviouer
Outline why consistency is important in attitudes
attitides change to be consistant with one another
attitides change to be consistant with behaviour
Explain cognitive dissonance theory
Cognitive dissonance (Festinger, 1957)
▪ If a cognition (i.e. an attitude) is in direct conflict with another one (or an action), and the two are related in some way, we experience tension
▪ Dissonance is uncomfortable (tension)
▪ We deal with this tension by either changing one of the cognitions, or adding an extra one to “explain” the apparent discrepancy
how is dissonance initiated?
- Forced compliance
- Decision-making
- Effort
▪ All forms will lead to actions that aim to reduce dissonance
Explain how forced complience leads to dissonance
Forced compliant behaviour
▪ Festinger & Carlsmith (1959)
▪ Boring task for 1 hour
▪ Persuade another person that the task was interesting, educational, worthwhile
▪ Paid either $1 or $20 for doing so
$1 more likely to change attitude because $20 did it just ofr money
explain how disision making leads to dissonance
Decision-making (Brehm, 1956)
▪ Participants asked to rate eight products (e.g., coffee maker, toaster, radio) from (1) definitely not desirable - (8) definitely desirable
▪ After rating these objects, participants were informed that their payment would be one of these products
▪ Ps offered choice between two highly desirable products (e.g., rated 5> on the scale) – high dissonance ▪ Ps offered choice between one highly desirable (>5) and one lower in desirability (e.g., at least 3 points lower) – low dissonance
▪ Ps given one product highly desirable product but no choice made – control
▪ Participants then provided factual information about each product and asked to rate products again
