The Study of Attitudes

• Each of us has positive and negative reactions (attitudes) to various persons, objects, and ideas

  • Self-Esteem: An attitude we hold about ourselves

  • Attraction: Positive attitude toward another person

  • Prejudice: A negative attitude often directed against certain groups

• Attitude: A positive, negative, or mixed evaluation of an object that is expressed at some level of intensity

  • We can react to something with positive affect, negative affect, ambivalence, apathy, or indifference

  • At times people have both positive and negative reactions to the same attitude objects without feeling conflict

    • They are conscious of one reaction but not the other

  • Attitude formation is often quick, automatic, and implicit

• Our attitudes reveal a lot about us as individuals

  • People differ in their tendency to like or dislike things

    • Dispositional Attitudes: A person’s tendency in general to like or dislike things

  • People differ in how quickly and strongly they react

• Pros and cons of attitudes

  • Attitudes serve important functions - enable us to judge quickly and without much thought

  • Having preexisting attitudes can lead us to be close-minded, biased, and more resistant to change

How Attitudes are Measured

Self-Report Measures

• Surveys

• Self-report measures are direct and straightforward, but attitudes are sometimes too complex to be measured by a single question

• Attitude Scales: Multiple-item questionnaire designed to measure a person’s attitude toward some object

  • Likert Scale - Participants asked to indicate on a multiple-point scale how strongly they agree or disagree with each statement

• All self-report measures assume that people honestly express their true opinions

• Increase the accuracy of self-report measures

  • Bogus Pipeline: A phony lie detector that is sometimes used to get respondents to give truthful answers to sensitive questions

Covert Measures

• Observable behaviors

  • ex: facial expressions, tone of voice, body language

  • People monitor their overt behavior

• Involuntary physical reactions

  • ex: perspiration, heart rate, pupil dilation

  • Reveals the intensity of an attitude

  • Doesn’t show whether the attitude is positive or negative

• Facial Electromyograph (EMG): Looks at the muscles in the face that contract when we feel happy/sad and aren’t seen with the naked eye

• EEG - Hans Burger: Brain-wave patterns that are normally triggered by inconsistency increased more when a disliked stimulus appeared after a string of positive items and vice versa

• The Implicit Association Test

  • Implicit Attitude: An attitude that someone is not aware of having

  • Measures implicit attitudes by the speed in which it takes you to answer the questions

How Attitudes are Formed

Inherited

• Abraham Tesser: Strong likes and dislikes are rooted in our genetic makeup

• People may be predisposed to hold certain attitudes

• Related to inborn physical, sensory, and cognitive skills, temperament, and personality traits

Learned

• Formed as a result of our exposure to our surroundings

• Pavlovian responses - we are conditioned to form attitudes to certain stimuli

• Evaluative Conditioning: The process by which we form an attitude toward a neutral stimulus because of its association with a positive or negative person, place, or thing

The Link between Attitudes and Behavior

• Richard LaPierre: Attitudes and behavior don’t always go together

• Allan Wicker: Attitudes and behavior are only weakly correlated

• Stephan Kraus: Attitudes significantly and substantially predict future behavior

Context

• Level of correspondence / similarity between attitude measures and behavior

  • The more specific the initial attitude question was, the better it predicted the behavior

• Icek Ajzen’s Theory of Planned Behavior: Our attitudes influence our behavior through a process of deliberate decision making, and their impact is limited in four respects

  • Limit One: Behavior is influenced less by general attitudes than by attitudes toward a specific behavior

  • Limit Two: Behavior is also influenced by subjective norms (our beliefs about what others think we should do)

  • Limit Three: Attitudes give rise to behavior only when we perceive the behavior to be within our control

  • Limit Four: People often do not or cannot follow through on their intentions

Strength of the Attitude

• Specific attitudes combine with social factors to produce behavior

• Depends on the importance / strength of the attitude

• Attitudes people hold most passionately are those that concern issues that…

  • Directly affect their own self-interest

  • Relate to deeply held philosophical, political, and religious values

  • Are of concern to their close friends, family, and social in-groups

• When people are surrounded by others who are like-minded, the attitudes they hold are stronger and more resistant to change

• Factors that indicate the strength of an attitude and its link to behavior

  • People tend to behave in ways that are consistent with their attitudes when they are well informed

  • Attitudes are more stable and more predictive of behavior when they are born of direct personal experience

  • An attitude can be strengthened by an attack against it from a persuasive message

  • Strong attitudes are highly accessible in awareness (they are quickly and easily brought to mind)

Cultural Context

• Western cultures

  • Value independence

  • Common to see our attitudes as a part of who we are

  • Our likes and dislikes will remain relatively consistent over time and predictive of behavior

• East Asian cultures

  • Independence is less highly valued

  • A person’s attitude might not show the same level of consistency

  • Attitude depends more on contextual factors (social norms, others’ expectations, roles, and obligations)

Persuasion by Communication

• Persuasion: Changing attitudes

Two Routes to Persuasion

• Can stick to policy, issues, and rational argumentation through the power of words or they can base their appeals on other grounds

• Richard Petty and John Cacioppo: dual-process model of persuasion

Central Route to Persuasion

• When people think hard and critically about the contents of a message and are influenced by the strength and quality of the arguments

• For a persuasive message to have influence, the recipients of that message must learn its contents and be motivated to accept it

• People can be persuaded only by an argument they attend to, comprehend, and retain in memory for later use

• First step: learning / reception of a message

• Second step: acceptance of a method

• Third step: elaboration

• People who are smart or high in self-esteem are better able to learn a message, but are less likely to accept its call for a change in attitude

• People who are less smart or low in self-esteem are more willing to accept the message, but they may have trouble learning its contents

• (Neither group is generally more vulnerable to persuasion than the other)

• When people consider a message carefully, their reaction to it depends on the strength of its contents

  • Messages have greater impact when they’re easily learned, memorable, and when they stimulate a good deal of favorable elaboration

• Self-Validation Hypothesis: People not only elaborate on a persuasive communication with positive or negative attitude-relevant thoughts; they’ll also seek to assess the validity of these thoughts

Peripheral Route to Persuasion

• When people don’t think hard or critically about the contents of a message but focus instead on other cues

• People will often evaluate a communication by using simple-minded heuristics (rules of thumb)

The Source

Credibility

• High credibility sources are generally more persuasive than low-credibility sources

• To be seen as credible, communicators must have

  • Competence: A speaker’s ability

    • We assume that experts know what they’re talking about

    • When they speak, we listen

    • People pay more attention to experts than to nonexperts and scrutinize their arguments more carefully

      • Depends on how we feel about the attitude they advocate

      • People scrutiny nonexperts more than experts when they advocate a position we agree with

      • People scrutinize nonexperts more when they advocate a position we oppose

  • Trustworthiness: Must be seen as willing to report their knowledge truthfully and without compromise

    • The more products a celebrity endorses, the less trustworthy they appear to consumers

    • People are impressed by others who take unpopular stands or argue against their own interests

    • People are influenced more when they think they’re accidentally overhearing a conversation than when they receive a sales pitch

Likability

• Two factors that spark attraction

  • Similarity

  • Physical attractiveness

• Recipient’s level of involvement

  • When a message has personal relevance to your life, you pay attention to the source and think critically about the message

  • When a message doesn’t have personal relevance, you take the source at face value and spend little time scrutinizing the info

  • Personal involvement determined the relative impact of the expertise of the source and the quality of speech

• Sleeper Expect: Delayed persuasive impact of a low-credibility communicator

  • Discounting Cue Hypothesis: People immediately discount the arguments made by non-credible communicators, but over time, they dissociate what was said from who said it

The Message

• What a person has to say and how that person says it

Informational Strategies

• Length of message

  • Peripheral Route: Longer is better. people assume the longer a message, the more valid it must be

  • Central Route: Longer is only better if the added arguments are strong and not weak/redundant

• Order of presentation

  • Primacy Effect: Information that is presented first has more impact

    • First impressions are important

  • Recency Effect: Information that is presented last has more impact

    • Memory fades over time, and people often recall only the last argument

Message Discrepancy

• Taking an extreme position is counterproductive

• Communicators should exercise caution and not push for too much change so that the audience won’t reject the message outright

Fear Appeals

• Irving Janis and Seymour Feshbach: High levels of fear didn’t generate increased agreement with a persuasive communication

• Research has shown that appeals that arouse high levels of fear can be highly effective

• Fear arousal increases the incentive to change for those who don’t actively resist it

• Ultimate impact depends on

  • Strength of the arguments

  • Whether the message contains clear and reassuring advice on how to cope with the threatened danger

Positive Emotions

• Positive feelings activate the peripheral route to persuasion

  • A positive emotional state is cognitively distracting

    • Causes the mind to wander

    • Impairs our ability to think critically about the persuasive arguments

  • When people are in a good mood, they let down their guard

    • They assume all is well

    • They become lazy processors of info

  • When ppl are happy, they become motivated to maintain their good mood

    • It would spoil their happy mood to think critically about new info

    • When happy people receive an agreeable message, this won’t spoil their mood, so they think critically with the central route to persuasion

Subliminal Messages

• Subliminal Advertising: The presentation of commercial messages outside conscious awareness

• William Bryan Key: Advertisers routinely sneak faint sexual images in visual ads to heighten the appeal of their products

• There’s no solid evidence of subliminal influence

• People can process info at an unconscious level, but this processing is analytically limited

• People perceive subliminal cues but aren’t persuaded into action unless they’re motivated to do so

  • Erin Strahan

  • Subliminal thirst primes had no impact on students who recently drank

  • Primes increased water consumption among those who were thirsty

The Audience

• The impact of a message is influenced by the recipient’s personality and their expectations

The Need for Cognition

• Need for cognition: The extent to which an individual enjoys and participated in effortful cognitive activities

• People who are high in their need for cognition like to work on hard problems, search for clues, make fine distinctions, and analyze situations

• The higher a person’s NC is, the more they think about material, the better they recall it, and the more persuaded they were by the strength of its arguments

Self-monitoring

• High self-monitors may be particularly responsive to messages that promise desirable social images

• High self monitors regulate their behavior from one situation to another out of concern for public self-presentation

• Low self-monitors are less image conscious and behave according to their own beliefs, values, and preferences

Regulatory Fit

• People are more likely to be influenced by messages that fit their frame of mind and “feel right”

• Promotion-oriented: Individuals who are drawn to the pursuit of success, achievements, and their ideals

• Prevention-oriented: Individuals who are protective of what they have, fearful of failure, and vigilant about avoiding loss

• Need for affect: Seeking out and enjoying feelings of strong emotion

  • High in need for affect: People are more receptive to messages that are presented in primarily cognitive or emotional terms

Forewarning and Resistance

• When people are aware that someone is trying to change their attitude, they become more likely to resist

• Inoculation Hypothesis: Our defenses can be reinforced by exposure to weak counter-arguments

• Psychological Reactance: When people think that someone is trying to change their attitude or otherwise manipulate them, they activate their psychological reactance

  • When a communicator comes on too strongly, we react w negative attitude change by moving in the direction that is the opposite of the one being advocated

    • This happens even when we agree with the communicator’s opinion

    • We want the freedom to think, feel, and act as we choose

  • Reactions:

    • The target can shut down in a reflex-like response

    • The target can disagree in a more thoughtful manner by questioning the credibility of the source and counterarguing the message

  • Forewarning doesn’t always increase resistance to persuasion

    • When the topic is personally not that important and they are forewarned, they start to agree before they even receive the message so as not to appear vulnerable to influence

    • When they’re forewarned about a topic with high personal importance, they think up counterarguments

Culture and Persuasion

• American ad campaigns were focused more on personal benefits, individuality, competition, and self-improvement

• Korean ads appealed more to integrity, achievement, and well-being of one’s in-groups

• Americans were persuaded more by individualistic ads

• Koreans were persuaded more by collectivistic ads

• In the US, celebrities portray themselves using or talking directly about a product

• In Korea, celebrities are more likely to play the role of someone else without being singled out

Persuasion by Our Own Actions

Role Playing

• Irving Janis: Attitude change would persist more when it’s inspired by our own behavior than when it stems from a passive exposure to a persuasive communication

• Participants change their attitudes more after giving a speech rather than just listening to it

• Role playing works to change attitudes bc it forces ppl to learn the message

• Attitude change is more enduring even when ppl who read a persuasive message merely expect that they’ll later have to communicate it with others

• It’s so easy to confuse what we do / say with how we feel

• Self-Generated Persuasion: More attitude change is produced by having ppl generate arguments themselves than listen passively to others making the same arguments

Cognitive Dissonance Theory: The Classic Version

• Cognitive Dissonance Theory: A powerful motive to maintain cognitive consistency can give rise to irrational, sometimes maladaptive, behavior

• All of us hold many cognitions about ourselves and the world around us, and sometimes these cognitions clash. these discrepancies can evoke an unpleasant state of tension (cognitive dissonance)

• Sometimes the easiest way to reduce dissonance is to change your attitude to bring it in line with your behavior

Justifying Attitude-Discrepant Behavior

• Insufficient Justification: Unless you deny your actions, you’ll feel pressured to change your attitude about the task

  • A condition in which people freely perform an attitude-discrepant behavior without receiving a large reward

  • Participants reduced cognitive dissonance by changing their attitude

  • When ppl behave in ways that contradict their attitudes, they sometimes go on to change those attitudes without any exposure to a persuasive communication

  • Contradicts the belief that big rewards produce greater change

• Insufficient Deterrence: Mild punishment is insufficient deterrence for attitude-discrepant non-behavior

  • A condition in which people refrain from engaging in a desirable activity, even when only mild punishment is threatened

  • The less severe the threatened punishment, the greater the attitude change produced

• Justifying effort

  • The more time or money or effort you choose to invest in something, the more anxious you’ll feel if the outcome proves disappointing

  • We cope with this inconsistency is to alter your attitudes

  • The more you pay for something, the more you’ll come to like it

• Justifying difficult decisions

  • A decision is difficult when the alternative courses of action are about equally desirable

  • People rationalize whatever they decide by exaggerating the positive features of the chosen alternative and the negative features of the unchosen alternative

Cognitive Dissonance Theory: A New Look

• People will feel discomfort and change their attitudes when they disagree with others in a group

• Vicarious Dissonance: People will feel discomfort and change their attitudes when they observe inconsistent behavior from others with whom they identify

• The motivation to reduce dissonance can alter our visual representations of the natural environment

• Cooper and Fazio: Four steps are necessary for both the arousal and reduction of dissonance

  • The attitude-discrepant behavior must produce unwanted negative consequences

  • A feeling of personal responsibility for the unpleasant outcomes of behavior

    • Freedom of choice: When people believe they had no choice, there is no dissonance and no attitude change

    • Potential negative consequences of their actions were foreseeable at the time: when the outcome couldn’t have been anticipated, there is no dissonance and no attitude change

    • Physiological arousal

    • Person must make an attribution for that arousal to their behavior

Alternative Routes to Self-Persuasion

• Self-Perception Theory: We infer how we feel by observing others and the circumstances of our own behavior

  • The change occurs bc ppl infer how they feel by observing their own behavior

• Impression-Management Theory: What matters is not a motive to be consistent but a motive to appear consistent. Cognitive dissonance only produces reported change

  • Attitude change is spurred by concerns about self-presentation

• Self-esteem Theories: Acts that arouse dissonance do so because they threaten the self-concept, making the person feel guilty, dishonest, or hypocritical, and motivating a change in attitude or future behavior

  • The change is motivated by threats to the self-concept

Ethical Dissonance

• Unintentional lapses in ethics that can occur when otherwise good ppl don’t pay attention, causing blind spots in ethical judgment

• Intentional wrongdoing that people knowingly commit in order to serve their own interests

• Most ppl feel badly about their unethical acts even when they don’t fear exposure bc of ethical dissonance

• Moral Licensing: A tendency to justify an anticipated misdeed by citing good things that we’ve done

Cultural Influences on Cognitive Dissonance

• Cognitive dissonance is universal

• Cognitive dissonance is dependent on culture