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Chapter Six: Attitudes

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