Attitudes psych 137

Defining Attitudes

A global evaluation of an object (person, place, or issue) along a positive-negative dimension that influences thought and action

• Learned: not born with attitudes

• Global evaluations

  • Summary evaluations of beliefs, feelings, intentions

• Influence thought and action

  • Some stronger, some weaker

  • Judgments about people/objects/issues

  • Behavior toward others

    • Stronger attitudes have a stronger effect on actions

Attitudes affect perception and judgment

Refugee image – we're biased, and off the bat, seeing the picture differently (e.g. Democrats & Republicans) based on our beliefs

Attitude Structure

• They are based on “ABC” Information

• Affective Component 

  • the person’s emotions and affect towards the object

• Behavioral Component

  • how a person tends to act towards the object

• Cognitive Component

  • consists of thoughts and beliefs the person has about the object

• These three components are not always consistent with one another

Negative stimuli give us much stronger (longer duration, higher intensity) reactions than positive ones

We're wired to be responsive to potential threats

Divergent attitudes

Attitudes can come into conflict
E.g. research with animals – we depend on animal research for our medications and our health v. seeing research on animals as animal cruelty

Attitudes versus Values and Beliefs

• Values: “desirable end states or behaviors that transcend specific situations, guide selection or evaluation of behavior and events, and are ordered by relative importance”

  • They are broader than attitudes & guiding principles in our lives.
    Attitudes come from our values

  • More global and abstract than attitudes

    • e.g., freedom, equality, power, self-fulfillment, security

  • Attitudes are the bridge, and thus our primary focus

• Attitudes and values are not always compatible

• Beliefs=cognitions about the world; subjective probabilities that an object has a a particular attribute or that an action will lead to a particular outcome

• More specific and cognitive than attitudes-they are more specific than attitudes,
  and they stem from our attitudes

  • E.g. College students drink too much; kale is good for you; immigrants
    are hard-working or dangerous

Defining Beliefs 

• cognitions about the world; subjective probabilities that an object has a particular attribute or that an action will lead to a particular outcome

• More specific and cognitive than attitudes

  • e.g., College students drink too much; The death penalty should be abolished. Kale is good for you

Confusing Beliefs with Values 

• Not always true or testable

  • Taliban leader claims Americans don’t love children

  • ¼th of Americans believe there’s no evidence of global warming

  • 1/3rd believe vaccines cause Autism

  • 1/3rd don’t believe in evolution

• Not always verifiable

  • 68% of Americans believe in life after death

  • 62% believe in hell and the devil

Confusing Beliefs with Facts

• Beliefs are not always true or testable. False beliefs tend to be strongly held and
  highly resistant to change

  • 1/4th of Americans believe there's no evidence of global warming – e.g. environmental regulation policies are often in conflict with free market solutions, which is a top priority for them

  • 1/3 of people believe vaccines cause autism

    • Evidence suggests that when people don't trust science, it's because they are motivated to protect their social identity and be accepted by the
      group. Group's values are so strong that people are willing to overlook evidence

• Identity-protective cognition: tendency to selectively credit evidence in patterns that reflect people’s commitments to their groups

  • High-risk v. low-risk study: When expert says something
    inconsistent with the participant's beliefs, think that he's not as much of an expert. When he says something that is consistent with their group's beliefs, they think he has greater expertise

  • Critical thinking study: People with greater critical thinking skills
    were actually more polarized in their attitudes – get better at
    cherry picking arguments

• Need to belong outweighs need to be accurate

• Study 1: Dan Kahan found that people compare new eidence with their groups’ position

  • If there is a mismatch, they dismiss the source as nonexpert.

  • If it matches, they consider him an expert

• Study 2: Other research finds that disbelief in global warming is not about lack of scientific reasoning ability

• Better scientific reasoning ability leads to even more polarization of attitudes

Expectancy-Value Approach

• Attitudes are combination of:

  • strength of beliefs that an object has certain attributes (expectancies)

  • evaluation of those attributes (how good or bad is it?)

    • Belief: “Vaping will make you popular.”

    • Evaluation: “It’s very good to be popular.”

• Ostensibly similar attitudes driven by different combinations of beliefs/evaluations

• These require different persuasion strategies to change

Measuring Attitudes: Direct Methods

• Likert Scale

  • A numerical scale used to assess attitudes; includes a set of possible answers with

    labeled anchors on each extreme

• Semantic Differential

  • Participants rate a concept using bipolar adjectives

  • Range of intervals to indicate the concept’s position along the continuum

Measuring Attitudes: Indirect Methods

• Why do we use implicit measures?

  • Self-Presentational Concerns, Lack of Introspective Awareness

• Response Latency: amount of time it takes to respond to a stimulus

  • 1984 Presidential Election: Faster responders showed greater consistency between 

    attitudes and behavior

• Implicit Measures: an indirect measure of attitudes that does not involve a self-report

  • Implicit association test (IAT)

• Physiological Measures:

  • galvanic skin response, pupil dilation, EMG

Measuring Attitudes with fMRI

• 75% of Americans consider themselves environmentalists & 80% believe in changing lifestyles to protect the environment

• But only 17% actually purchase green products (Eurobarometer, 2008) and self-report measures explain < 10% of variance in actual green purchasing behavior

• Mere Green Effect fMRI Study: shown either pro-environment or control ads, indicated liking for the ads

• Reported liking green ads more than control ads.

• Greater activation in VPFC and Ventral Striatum (associated w/ personal value and reward) for preferred control ads, but not for green ads.

• Brain-as-Predictor: studies suggest brain activation may be better predictor of behavior in certain cases

Predicting Behavior from Attitudes

• Attitudes may be poor predictors of behavior

  • LaPiere study in the 1930s

    • Traveling across the US with a Chinese couple at time when anti-Chinese prejudice was high

• Surprisingly, they were denied service at only one of the 250 places they visited

• However, when contacted later, 90% said they would not serve Chinese customers

Attitudes Can Be Inconsistent

• Attitudes may be inconsistent

  • Emotional and cognitive aspects may conflict

    • The different components of an attitude may not always align. In particular, there can be a rift between the affective component and the cognitive component

Attitudes Can Conflict with Other Powerful Determinants of Behavior

• Attitudes may conflict with other influences on behavior

  • other conflicting attitudes and situational factors may also influence behavior

  • Social Norms are also an important influence on behavior

    • Research suggests that social norms have stronger influence on behavior when attitudes are ambivalent

• Norms vary across cultures

Attitudes and Behavior

• Introspecting about the Reasons for Our Attitudes

• Wilson & colleagues have found that introspecting about the reasons one likes or dislikes an attitude object can disrupt attitude-behavior consistency

• Tim Wilson asked people to either give an overall evaluation of their partner or to list the reasons for the way they felt about their partner and then to give an evaluation

• 9 mo.’s later, those who just gave an overall evaluation were more accurate predictors of their current relationship than those who gave reasons for how they felt about their partner

• Introspection disrupts emotion-based attitudes more so than cognitive ones

Predicting Behavior From Attitudes

• Compatibility Principle: a strong relationship between attitudes and behavior is possible only if they are both measured at the same level of specificity

• Attitudes better predict behaviors when specific attitudes toward a specific behavior are measured

• General attitudes predict broad classes of behavior that cut across different situations.

Based on prototypical examples of situations and people.

• Attitude Prototype Study

  • Males expressed stereotypes & attitudes about gay men

  • Asked if they would be willing to give a tour to John B., a gay man who either matched stereotype or not.

  • If he didn’t match their individual stereotype, attitudes didn’t predict their behavior. If he did match, their behavior was strongly predicted by their attitudes towards gay men

When Attitudes are Good Predictors of Behavior

• Strong attitudes are better predictors of behavior than weak ones

• Attitudes learned through direct experience

• Specific attitudes predict specific behaviors

• Low self-monitors have higher attitude-behavior consistency than high self-monitors

• Accessible attitudes predict behavior

  • Fazio’s Accessibility Model suggests that when we don’t have the motivation or ability to consider pros and cons of our actions, whatever attitudes are most accessible will automatically predict behavior

The Theory of Planned Behavior (aka Theory of Reasoned Action)

• Behavior can be predicted, but depends on…

• People’s likes and dislikes (attitudes)

• People’s natural propensity to please others (norms)

  • Injunctive: what we should do

  • Descriptive: what others are doing /will do

• People’s confidence that they can carry out their plans (perceived behavioral control)

Predicting Attitudes from Behavior

• Attitudes may not predict behavior as strongly as expected, but behavior has a powerful influence on attitudes.

• Attitudes may change in order to be consistent with behaviors

• Our need to be consistent and authentic