4.2
Learning Targets & Foundations of Attitudes
Learning Targets:
- 4.2-1: Describe how our attitudes and actions interact.
- 4.2-2: Describe how peripheral route persuasion and central route persuasion differ.
Nature of Attitudes:
- Attitudes predispose reactions to objects, people, and events.
- For example, believing that someone is threatening induces feelings of fear and anger, leading to defensive behavior.
- The relation between attitudes and actions functions as a two-way street: attitudes influence actions, and actions reciprocally shape attitudes.
How Attitudes Affect Actions
Direct Impact of Attitudes on Behavior:
- Hateful attitudes actively feed violent behavior.
- Changed attitudes lead directly to changed actions (e.g., altering beliefs about skin cancer risks reduces tanning behavior).
Situational Overrides:
- Situational factors, such as intense social pressure, can override the connection between attitudes and behavior (Wallace et al., 2005).
- Politicians may vote according to the demands of their supporters despite holding private disagreements (Nagourney, 2002), or publicly advocate for behaviors they do not privately perform.
Conditions Maximizing Attitude Impact on Behavior:
- Attitudes are most predictive of behavior under specific conditions (Glasman & Albarracín, 2006):
- External influences and pressures are minimal.
- The attitude is stable.
- The attitude is specifically relevant to the targeted behavior.
- The attitude is easily recalled.
Sun-Tanning Experiment on Attitude and Behavior Change:
- Study Design & Intervention (McClendon & Prentice-Dunn, 2001):
- Target population: White sun-tanning college students.
- Experimental group: Exposed to vivid, easily remembered information warning that repeated tanning created a risk for future skin cancer.
- Control group: Received no such vivid warning information.
- Experimental Variables:
- Independent Variable: The type of information presented (vivid risk information vs. no information).
- Dependent Variable: The level of skin lightness / tanning behavior change observed.
- Results: One month following the intervention, 72% of experimental group participants had lighter skin, compared to only 16% of control group participants.
How Actions Affect Attitudes
The Attitudes-Follow-Behavior Principle:
- People not only stand up for what they believe, but also come to believe more strongly in what they have stood up for.
- Cooperative actions, such as those performed by members of sports teams (e.g., Germany's national soccer team celebrating a World Cup victory), promote mutual liking, which in turn fosters positive future behavior.
The Foot-in-the-Door Phenomenon:
- Definition: The tendency for people who have first agreed to a small request to comply later with a larger request.
- Korean War Prisoner Case Study (Lifton, 1961; Schein, 1956):
- Chinese communist war camps held U.S. prisoners during the Korean War.
- Captors secured prisoner collaboration by starting with small, harmless requests (e.g., running errands to gain privileges, copying trivial statements).
- Demands escalated gradually: copying statements listing flaws of capitalism, participating in group discussions, writing self-criticisms, making false confessions, informing on fellow prisoners, divulging U.S. military information, and making public confessions.
- Outcome: Prisoners adjusted their personal beliefs to align with their public actions. Upon war conclusion, 21 U.S. prisoners chose to remain with the communists, while others returned home convinced that communism was beneficial for Asia.
- Escalation Mechanics:
- Small requests build to larger compliance (Cialdini, 1993).
- A trivial act makes the subsequent act easier; small lies pave the way to becoming a fraud; yielding to initial temptation makes subsequent temptation harder to resist.
- Yard Sign Experiment (Freedman & Fraser, 1966):
- Goal: Secure permission from homeowners to place a large, unsightly "Drive Carefully" sign in their yards.
- Baseline condition: Direct request yielded a 17% agreement rate.
- Experimental condition: Homeowners were first asked to perform a small favor—displaying a 3-inch-high "Be a Safe Driver" window sign.
- Result: Prior compliance with the small request caused the agreement rate for the large yard sign to soar to 76%.
- Societal & Historical Applications:
- Used to increase charitable contributions and blood donations.
- Assisted U.S. school desegregation following the Civil Rights Act of 1964. As desegregation became law and actions changed, White Americans expressed diminishing racial prejudice.
- Uniform national standards against discrimination led to uniform national behavior and thinking.
- Proves that moral actions strengthen moral convictions.
The Door-in-the-Face Effect:
- Definition: Commencing with an unreasonable or extreme request that is refused (the "door in the face") makes a subsequent, moderate follow-up request significantly more acceptable.
- Example: Asking an individual to volunteer daily for two weeks (unreasonable request) increases compliance when following up with a request to volunteer for 30 minutes (moderate request).
Doing Becomes Believing:
- Coaxing people into acting against their attitudes or violating moral standards alters their beliefs:
- Harmful acts: Delivering presumed electric shocks or making nasty comments toward an innocent victim leads perpetrators to look down on and disparage the victim.
- Speech and writing: Speaking or writing on behalf of a position about which one has initial qualms causes the individual to begin believing their own statements.
Role-Playing and Attitude Modification
Role Dynamics:
- Adopting a new role (e.g., becoming a college student, entering a new job, wearing nurse scrubs for the first time) requires following social norms.
- Initial behaviors often feel phony or like play-acting, but continuous performance of the role internalizes the associated attitudes (Woods et al., 2020).
- Examples: Soldiers initially playing war games come to fully embrace military attitudes; young adults moving out feel like children playing at "adulting" before internalizing adulthood.
Extreme Role-Playing Applications:
- Training Torturers (Staub, 1989): In the early 1970s, the Greek military government trained torturers via step-by-step role escalation:
- Trainee played the role of guard outside an interrogation cell.
- Foot-in-the-door escalation: Trainee stood guard inside the interrogation cell.
- Full role adoption: Trainee actively participated in questioning and torture.
- Personality Alteration in Military Personnel (Jackson et al., 2012): Military training in German men toughened their personalities, leaving them measurably less agreeable even 5 years after leaving military service.
Person-Situation Interaction:
- Acting like surrounding peers incrementally transforms an individual to be more like the group and less like their former self.
- Individual differences persist: In real-life atrocity-producing situations, some individuals succumb to situational forces while others resist (Haslam & Reicher, 2007, 2012; Mastroianni & Reed, 2006; Zimbardo, 2007). Personality and situation continuously interact.
Cognitive Dissonance Theory
Definition & Cause:
- Cognitive Dissonance: The uncomfortable mental tension experienced when becoming aware that personal attitudes and actions do not coincide.
- Theory formulated by Leon Festinger (1957).
Mechanisms of Tension Reduction:
- To relieve cognitive dissonance, individuals can either adjust their actions to match their attitudes or adjust their attitudes to align with their past actions.
Experimental Demonstrations (Levy et al., 2018):
- Design: Participants were induced to feel responsible for behavior clashing with their private attitudes with foreseeable consequences (e.g., writing an essay advocating for a tuition increase).
- Conditions:
- Low-Incentive Group: Offered a small sum of money to write the essay.
- High-Incentive Control Group: Offered a large sum of money to write the same essay.
- Results & Rationalization:
- Low-incentive participants experienced significant dissonance due to insufficient external justification.
- To relieve tension, low-incentive participants changed their actual attitudes to align with their written words, rationalizing: "If I chose to do it for just a small amount of money, I must believe in it."
- Principle: The less coerced and more personally responsible an individual feels for a troubling act, the greater the cognitive dissonance, and the higher the motivation to alter attitudes to achieve internal consistency.
Behavioral Control of Feelings & Identity:
- Direct control over feelings is limited, but feelings can be indirectly altered through changed behavior.
- Therapeutic & Practical Applications:
- Managing Depression: Altering attributions to explain events in positive terms with greater self-acceptance and fewer self-put-downs (Rubenstein et al., 2016).
- Cultivating Affection: Acting lovingly (performing thoughtful acts, expressing affection, giving affirmation) fosters actual feelings of love.
- Identity Development: Volunteering among teenagers promotes the formation of a compassionate identity.
- Levine's Insight (Robert Levine, 2016): Asking "How should I act?" is simultaneously asking "Who is the person I want to become?"
- Core takeaway: Pretense becomes reality; conduct sculpts character; what we do, we become. Not only can individuals think themselves into action, but they can also act themselves into a way of thinking.
Persuasion and the Elaboration Likelihood Model
Definition of Persuasion:
- Persuasion is the deliberate attempt to influence actions by changing attitudes.
Elaboration Likelihood Model:
- Model positing that when individuals actively process and mentally elaborate on a message, retention and attitude change are enhanced.
- Divides persuasion into two primary pathways: Peripheral Route Persuasion and Central Route Persuasion.
Peripheral Route Persuasion:
- Mechanism: Utilizes attention-getting, superficial cues to trigger rapid, emotion-based judgments without deep cognitive elaboration.
- Vaccine Attitude Experiment (Horne et al., 2015):
- Group A: Provided factual information debunking the myth that vaccines cause autism.
- Group B: Shown vivid photos of unvaccinated children suffering from mumps, measles, or rubella, accompanied by a parent's description of measles.
- Experimental Variables:
- Independent Variable: Type of information presented (factual debunking vs. vivid photographic/narrative evidence).
- Dependent Variable: Measured level of support for vaccines.
- Result: Only Group B (exposed to vivid emotional photos and descriptions) demonstrated increased support for vaccines.
- The Halo Effect & Celebrity Endorsements:
- Uses perceived trust, intelligence, or attractiveness of famous figures.
- Examples: Actor Cate Blanchett urging public action against climate change; Pope Francis (2015) stating that "Climate change is a global problem with grave implications."
- Advertising: Heart-tugging imagery used to trigger fast purchase decisions.
Central Route Persuasion:
- Mechanism: Offers factual evidence and logical arguments aimed at triggering careful, systematic thinking and cognitive elaboration.
- Examples:
- Commercial Ads: Itemizing all technical features of a new electronic gadget to convince buyers.
- Climate Change Advocacy: Presenting scientific evidence on accumulating greenhouse gases, melting arctic ice, rising global temperatures, rising sea levels, and increasing extreme weather events (van der Linden et al., 2015).
- Target Audience & Effectiveness:
- Most effective for individuals who are naturally analytical or deeply involved in the issue.
- Produces attitude change that is more thoughtful, less superficial, and significantly more durable over time.