L5&6 - Attitudes and Attitude Change

Question 1

Define Attitude

Answer 1

• Tendencies to evaluate an entity with some degree of favour or disfavour
• Expressed in cognitive, affective, and behavioural responses
• Attitudes are inferred, cannot be observed directly

Question 2

What is the three component view of attitude?

Answer 2

The observed variables are
- Attitude object
- Affective responses: ask how they feel
- Cognitive responses: features of object, factual
- Behavioural responses: what they do with their action

WHICH LEAD TO
The inferred variable: Attitude

Question 3

What is cognitive dissonance theory?

Answer 3

• Feeling dissonance when we are acting in a way that is inconsistent with our attitudes
• To reduce this, we bring our actions in line with attitudes
• Attitudes should be consistent with behaviours

Question 4

What was early evidence for cog dis?

Answer 4

• LaPiere: Professor travelled across US with Chinese couple (helpful during that time).
• Normal prejudice and discrimination to immigrants in lower class jobs. But they were received well - this is the behaviour observation.
• The same establishments were asked whether they would serve members of the Chinese race, and many said no.
• Attitudes and behaviours DO NOT coincide.
• Similar occurence with a black woman

Question 5

What did Wicker do?

Answer 5

• Reviewed 42 studies of attitude-behaviour relationship
• Found studies where relationship between attitude and behaviour was larger than 0.3, when average correlation was 0.15
• Saying that there was little evidence to support stable underlying attitudes within an individual that affect actions

Question 6

Why reject Wicker?

Answer 6

Method:
- Aggregation of measures: for two measures to correlate, they must be reliable and valid indicators of the construct
- Compatibility of measures: for both measures to correlate, they must both refer to the same target, action, context and time

Theoretical:
- Attitudes are not the only determinant of behaviour
- Use a framework that includes social influences

Question 7

What is the Theory of Reasoned Action?

Answer 7

• We have an attitude to behaviour & subjective norm which leads to behavioural intention, leading to behaviour

Question 8

What do attitudes of behaviour and subjective norm mean?

Answer 8

• Behavioural beliefs and outcome evaluations
  e.g voting for party will help protect NHS, Protecting NHS is good
• Normative beliefs and motivation to comply
  e.g my friends think i should vote for party, i like to do what my friends expect me to

Question 9

Limitations of Theory of Reasoned Action

Answer 9

• Can not predict behaviours that require resources, cooperation, skill

Question 10

What is the theory of planned behaviour?

Answer 10

• Attitude to behaviour, Subjective norm, AND perceived behavioural control
• Indirectly lead to behavioural intention, but directly lead to behaviour

Question 11

What is perceived behavioural control?

Answer 11

When indirect:
- Do not form intentions without taking some account of how much control you have over the behaviour
When direct:
- Sometimes your intention to behave in a certain way does not result in the behaviour
- Because there is a lack of control over the behaviour
- If accurate and therefore reflects this lack of control, it will help to predict behaviour

Question 12

Study to show cognitive dissonance

Answer 12

• Ppt performed boring tasks
• Ppts were asked to tell next ppt that it was interesting for $1/$20
• As $1 is a small amount and you are lying, you feel dissonance so you must change your attitude
• As $20 is a larger amount, it gives confirmation that the study was boring, and that it is a supplement for lying

Question 13

What are the ways of inducing cognitive dissonance?

Answer 13

• Forced compliance
• Sense that you are personally responsible for bringing about undesirable consequences
• Getting people to make choices between alternatives that are roughly equal in attractiveness
• Exposing people to information that is inconsistent with their attitudes and/or behaviour

Question 14

What is the Elaboration Likelihood Model?

Answer 14

• Dual process model
• Contrasting perspective to Cogn.Dis.

Question 15

What is the actual model?

Answer 15

• Motivated to process, able to process, what is the nature of cog processing, causing cog structure change, changing the attitude either positively or negatively
• If you cannot process, if there is a peripheral cue, then you can change attitude peripherally.
• If no cue, attitude is retained.

Question 16

What is motivation to process? Study?

Answer 16

• Participants listened to message advocating ‘senior comprehensive examinations’ under one of two conditions:
  1) university considering introducing these exams next year (high involvement)
  2) university considering introducing these exams next decade (low involvement)
• Message was either strong (high argument quality) or weak (low argument quality)
• Message had been produced by either local high school class (low expertise)
  or “Carnegie Commission on Higher Education” (high expertise)

Question 17

What is motivation to process? Results?

Answer 17

• Low involvement = source expertise affected attitudes
• High involvement = argument quality affected attitudes

Question 18

Study that shows ability to process

Answer 18

• Participants listened to a message advocating senior comprehensive examinations under one of four distraction conditions (monitor and record position of Xs projected during message):
  1) No (zero Xs per minute)
  2) Low (4 Xs per minute)
  3) Medium (12 Xs per minute)
  4) High (20 Xs per minute)
• Message was either
  Strong or weak

Question 19

Results of study that show ability to process

Answer 19

• At higher levels of distraction, participants who listened to strong message showed less agreement
• Participants who listened to weak message showed more agreement