attititudes and attitude change

• Attitude


  A relatively enduring organisation of beliefs, feelings and behavioural tendencies towards socially significant objects, events or symbols
• Attitude


  A general feeling or evaluation – positive or negative – about some person, object or issue
• Three-component model of attitudes

  • Affective - Expressions of feelings towards an attitude object
  • Cognitive - Expressions of beliefs about an attitude object
  • Behavioural - Overt actions/verbal statements concerning behaviour
• Attitudes towards eating meat

  • It is unhealthy and wrong to eat meat
  • The thought of eating meat makes me feel sick
  • I will only eat vegetarian food
• Simple dimension of attitudes

  Dogs are so sociable!
• Complex dimension of attitudes


  Dogs look well cute and friendly but I hate the way they smell
• Attitudes become stronger - more extreme positive or negative - if they are complex and evaluated consistently. If they are inconsistent, they become weaker or moderate as they come more complex
• Functions of attitudes


  • Knowledge Function - Organise and predict social world; provides a sense of meaning and coherence
  • Utilitarian Function - Help people achieve positive outcomes and avoid negative outcomes
  • Ego-defensive - Protecting one's self-esteem from harmful world
  • Value Expressive - Facilitate expression of one's core values and self-concept
• Mere exposure effect


  Repeated exposure of a stimulus enhances preference for that stimulus
• Classical conditioning


  Repeated association - previously neutral stimulus elicits reaction that was previously elicited only by another stimulus
• Classical conditioning and attitudes

  • Celebrity endorsement - Transfer the positive image of the celebrity to the product
• Instrumental conditioning


  Behaviour followed by positive consequences is more likely to be repeated; behaviour that is followed by negative consequences is not
• Instrumental conditioning and attitudes

  • Participants reported a more favorable attitude towards a topic if they had received positive feedback (vs negative) on the same attitude a week earlier
• Self-perception theory


  Gain knowledge of ourselves by making self-attributions: Infer attitudes from our behaviour
• Attitudes cannot be seen (measured) directly
• Methods for measuring attitudes

  • Self-report and experimental paradigms - Attitude scales, Implicit Association Task
  • Physiological measures - Skin resistance, heart rate, pupil dilation
  • Measures of overt behaviour - Frequency of behaviour, Trends and preferences over various objects, Non-verbal behaviour
• Attitudes are considered the crown jewel of social psychology because they predict behaviour
• There can be a mismatch between attitudes and behaviour, e.g. smokers often dislike smoking, understand the health risks, & intend to quit but continue to smoke
• Attitudes weakly correlate with behaviour - the average correlation was .15 in a meta-analysis with 42 studies
• Factors that impact how well attitudes predict behaviour


  • How strong the attitude is
  • Whether it is formed through direct experience
  • How it is measured - How specific the questions are, How closely the questions (intentions) relate to the behaviours
• Theory of Planned Behaviour


  • Attitude toward the behaviour
  • Subjective Norm
  • Perceived behavioural control
  • Intention
  • Behaviour
• The Theory of Planned Behaviour proposes people make decisions as a result of rational thought processes
• Individualistic cultures - behaviours determined by self-perceptions or internal beliefs. Collectivistic cultures - behaviours determined by social group pressures
• Personal control had a stronger association with intentions in an individualistic national culture than a collective. Subjective norms had a stronger predictive power in a collectivist nation than individualistic ones
• Cognitive Dissonance


  Unpleasant state of psychological tension generated when a person has two or more cognitions (thoughts) that are inconsistent or do not fit in together
• Cognitive Dissonance and attitude change

  • Reduce importance of cognition - 'I know lots of people who have smoked all of their lives and they haven't got lung cancer'
  • Add an element - 'I'm addicted, I can't help it. I need to smoke or the stress I'll suffer will be just as unhealthy'
  • Change one element - 'I'll stop smoking!'
• Elaboration Likelihood Model


  • Central route - When message is followed closely, considerable cognitive effort expended. Argument quality; analytical
  • Peripheral route - When arguments not well attended to; peripheral cues (e.g., attraction)
• Heuristic-Systematic Model


  • Systematic processing - When a message is attended to carefully; scan & consider available arguments
  • Heuristic processing - Use cognitive heuristics - e.g., 'statistics don't lie'
• The key difference between the Elaboration Likelihood Model and Heuristic-Systematic Model is pathways - the Elaboration Likelihood Model suggests pathways independent, whereby these could be active at the same time
• Real world applications of attitude research

  • Political campaigns
  • Advertising / sales
  • Encouraging socially valuable behaviours, e.g. Organ donation, Voluntary work, Environmental responsibility
• Changing attitudes and behaviours: Smoking


  • If smoking is a source of self esteem for someone, 'mortality salient' messages actually make them want to smoke more. If their smoking behaviour is not linked to their self-esteem, this isn't the case.