Psych of Attitudes Midterm

• An attitude is a mental position with regard to a fact or state
• Thurstone defines attitude as affect for or against a psychological object
• triandis defined attitude as ideas charged with affect, predisposing action
• attitude is a summary evaluation of an object of thought
• factors in attitude strength

  • confidence
  • extremity
  • coherence
  • importance
  • immutability
  • accessibility
• Facets in political attitudes :

  • Importance, which influences voting behavior and attempts to persuade
  • Certainty, which influences attempts to persuade and openness
• meta-attitudinal attitude strength: our subjective impressions of how strong our attitudes are
• meta-attitudinal strength is measured through questionnaires and interviews
• operative attitude strength: the objective impact of our attitudes on our thoughts, feelings, and behaviors
• operative attitude strength is measured by performance on experimental tasks
• holbrook and krosnick found that operative strength and meta attitudinal strength are...

  • not correlated
  • independent predictors of resistance to persuasion
  • but evidence suggests that operative measures are more predictive
• explicit attitudes: readily susceptible to cognitive reflection and deliberation
• implicit attitudes: evaluative mental associations that operate in largely automatic ways
• implicit attitudes can occur

  • spontaneously (no intention)
  • efficiently (no resources)
  • ballistically (hard to control)
  • unconsciously (without awareness)
• explicit attitudes are meta attitudinal, and accessed via self report
• implicit attitudes are operative and accessed via experimental performance
• we do not know the degree to which implicit and explicit attitudes toward the same attitude object is correlated
• implicit attitudes are evaluative mental associations that may operate in largely automatic ways
• "Which presidential candidate does Jose prefer?"

  • Asks how an attitude holder's attitude changes between comparable attitude objects
  • emphasis on the attitude object as the causal driver of the attitude
• "Who likes President Biden more, older voters or younger voters?"

  • asks how attitudes toward one attitude object compare across multiple attitude holders
• attitudes always reflect qualities of both the attitude object and the attitude holder
• Most people tend to assume their attitudes are objective and based on the attitude object's actual characteristics
• Social psychologists view attitudes as subjective -- based on the attitude holder (subject) and shaped by their characteristics
• general attitudes have broader relevance but weaker relation to specific behaviors
• The behavioral implications of specific attitudes are clearer than general attitudes
• Attitudes are summary evaluations
• Attitudes vary in strength and explicitness
• Attitudes vary in score and impact
• Syllogistic reasoning: A form of reasoning that involves the use of logical propositions.
• Zero order beliefs: unconscious beliefs that are assumed to be true. e.g., object permanence
• Horizontal structure: related attitudes, but if one changes than the others will not change. e.g., democrats are good b/c universal healthcare and democrats are good b/c gun control is good
• Vertical structure: related attitudes, but if one changes the others could change. e.g., Democrats are good because gun control is good, but if your mind about gun control changes your mind about democrats could change.
• Fishbein's Model:

  Belief strength (bi) - beliefs about the characteristics of attitude objects can vary in how firm/certain they are

  Evaluative strength (ei) - evaluations of those characteristics can vary from very negative to very positive

  summary evaluation - overall attitude reflects combination of these beliefs through a rational process
• Example of Fishbein's model:

  "Birth control promotes promiscuity":

  bi = -1 --> respondent believes birth control does NOT promote promiscuity

  ei = -1 --> respondent evaluates promoting promiscuity as bad

  biei = 1 --> the respondent's opinion improves, because they have evaluated a characteristic as bad, but believe the attitude object does NOT promote that characteristic
• through our interactions with social systems, we unwittingly absorb cultural ideas and values
• cultural conditioning can implicitly ground attitudes without conscious reflection
• 5 steps of cultural conditioning:

  1. observation: observing others in your culture
  2. imitation: everyone, esp kids, imitates what they see
  3. reinforcement: acting in ways that uphold cultural values for reinforcement
  4. direct: people admiring/liking you for it
  5. vicarious: seeing others get rewarded or rejected
  6. internalization: genuinely believing in the cultural system
  7. manifestation: manifesting behavior that upholds the cultural system
  8. including system recreation: becoming a role model within the system
• Evaluative conditioning: when an attitude object becomes associated with something you already like or dislike
• Evaluative conditioning is a transfer of attitude by mere association, not logic or reasoning
• experiencing a conditioned and unconditioned stimulus together --> transfer of evaluative response from unconditioned stimulus to conditioned stimulus