Chapter 7 - Attitudes and Attitude change Flashcards
(32 cards)
What is an attitude?
An attitude is a
person’s enduring evaluation of people, objects, and ideas.
• Where Do Attitudes Come From?
Although some attitudes may have a genetic component, they are based mostly on our experiences. Cognitively based attitudes
, Affectively based attitudes, Behaviorally based
Cognitively based attitudes
are based mostly on people’s beliefs about the properties of the attitude object
Affectively based attitudes
are based more on people’s emotions and values; they can be created through classical conditioning or operant conditioning.
Behaviorally based attitudes
are based on people’s actions toward the attitude object.
Explicit Versus Implicit Attitudes
Once an attitude develops, it can exist at two levels. Explicit attitudes are ones we consciously endorse and can easily report. Implicit attitudes operate outside of
conscious awareness.
Predicting Spontaneous Behaviors
Attitudes predict spontaneous behaviors only when they are relatively accessible. Attitude accessibility refers to the
strength of the association between an object and an evaluation of it.
Predicting Deliberative Behaviors
According to the theory of planned behavior, deliberative (nonspontaneous)
behaviors are a function of people’s
attitudes toward the specific act in question, subjective norms (people’s beliefs about how others view the behavior in question), and how much people believe they can control the behavior.
Subjective norms
people’s beliefs about how others view the behavior in question
How Do Attitudes Change?
Both internal and external factors influence our attitudes.
- Changing attitudes by changing behaviour
- emotion and attitude change
- attitude change and the body
Changing Attitudes by Changing Behavior:
Cognitive Dissonance Theory Revisited One way that attitudes change is when people engage in counterattitudinal advocacy for low external justification. When this occurs, we tend to find internal justification for our behavior, bringing our attitudes in line with our behavior.
- Persuasive communication and attitude change
According to the Yale Attitude Change approach, the effectiveness of a persuasive communication depends on aspects of the communicator, or source of the message; aspects of the message itself (e.g., its content); and aspects of the audience. - Elaboration Likelihood model - central route to persuasion - peripheral route to persuasion
- Elaboration Likelihood model
specifies when people are persuaded more by the strength of the arguments in the communication and when they are persuaded more by surface characteristics
- central route to persuasion
When people have both the motivation and ability to pay attention to a message, they take the central route to persuasion, where they pay close attention to the strength of the arguments.
- peripheral route to persuasion
When they have low motivation or ability, they take the peripheral route to persuasion, where they are swayed by surface characteristics, such as the attractiveness of
the speaker.
How do emotions influence attitude change?
- Fear-arousing communications can cause lasting attitude change if a moderate amount of fear is aroused and people believe they will be reassured by the content of the message.
- Emotions can also be used as heuristics
to gauge one’s attitude; if people feel good in the presence of an object, they often infer that they like it, even if those good feelings were caused by something else - the effectiveness of persuasive communications also depends on the type of
attitude people have. Appeals to emotion and social identity work best if the attitude is based on emotion and social identity.
Attitude change and the body
People’s confidence in their thoughts about an attitude object affects how much they will be influenced by a persuasive communication. People’s confidence can be affected by such things as whether they are
nodding or shaking their head while listening to a persuasive message.
Describe how advertising changes people’s
attitudes.
Advertising works by targeting affectively based attitudes with emotions, by targeting cognitively based attitudes with facts, and by making a product seem personally
relevant.
How to resist persuasive messages?
- Attitude Inoculation
- Being Alert to Product Placement
- Resisting Peer Pressure - Teaching kids how to resist peer pressure ahead of time can make them less vulnerable to it later on.
- When Persuasion Attempts Backfire: Reactance Theory
Attitude innoculation
Making people immune to attempts to change their attitudes by initially exposing them to small doses of the arguments against their position
Reactance Theory
The idea that when people feel their freedom to perform a certain behavior is threatened, an unpleasant state of resistance is aroused, which they can reduce by performing the prohibited behavior
According to reactance theory, people experience an unpleasant state called reactance when their freedom of choice is threatened. Attempts to manage people’s attitudes can backfire if they make people feel that their choices are limited.
What is the Thurstone scale and how is it calaculated? (equal appearing intervals)
First formal measure of an attitude
• Generate a large number of items about the attitude object
• Have judges rate each item on a scale of how favourable/ unfavourableit is towards the attitude object
• Compute median and interquartile range for each statement
• Select statements that are at equal intervals across the range of medians and that have small interquartile ranges.
• Randomly order statements in the scale.
• Score on the scale = average of scale scores of all the items that person agreed with
(Lect 12 @ 7min - listen)
Describe the Likert Scale
• Generate a large number of items about the attitude object
• Have judges rate each item for how much they agree or disagree with the statement
• Compute correlations between all pairs of items
• Exclude statements that are not strongly correlated with the others.
• Randomly order statements in the scale.
• Score on the scale = average of scale scores of all the items that person rated
(Lect 12 min 15) - more efficient to construct than thurstone (why?)
What is the relationship between what people say they will do, and what they actually do?
- Accessible attitudes are a better predictor of behaviour
- can be mismatch between what someone imgaines/envisages and the reality of a situation
- Eg. La piere (1934) - mismatch between attitudes and behaviour - allowing chinese residents to stay at hotel/restaurants
