Attitudes and Attitude Change
The Nature and Origin of Attitudes
Attitudes are evaluations of people, objects, or ideas.
They determine our actions and choices like food preferences, music choices, and voting decisions.
Where Do Attitudes Come From?
Genetics:
Identical twins share more attitudes compared to fraternal twins, even when raised separately.
Attitudes are an indirect function of genetic makeup related to temperament and personality.
Social Experiences: Play a major role in shaping attitudes.
Components of Attitudes:
Cognitive Component: Thoughts and beliefs about the attitude object.
Affective Component: Emotional reactions toward the attitude object.
Behavioral Component: How people act toward the attitude object.
Attitudes can be based on one or a combination of these components.
Cognitively Based Attitudes
Based primarily on relevant facts and objective merits of an object.
Allows classification of the pluses and minuses of an object to quickly determine if we want to engage with it.
Example: Evaluating a vacuum cleaner based on cleaning ability and cost.
Affectively Based Attitudes
Rooted more in emotions and values than objective appraisal.
Can stem from values like religious and moral beliefs, sensory reactions (taste), aesthetic reactions (admiring a painting) or conditioning.
Classical Conditioning: A stimulus that elicits an emotional response is paired with a neutral stimulus until the neutral stimulus elicits the emotional response.
Example: Smelling laundry detergent and chicken soup from your grandmother's house that elicit feelings of warmth and love.
Operant Conditioning: Behaviors become more or less frequent depending on reward or punishment.
Example: A child adopting racist attitudes after her father expresses disapproval of her playing with an African-American girl.
Characteristics:
Do not result from rational examination of the issues.
Not governed by logic.
Linked to people’s values, and efforts to change them challenge those values.
Behaviorally Based Attitudes
Stem from observations of one's own behavior toward an object (Self-Perception Theory).
People infer their attitudes from their behavior only under certain conditions:
Initial attitude is weak or ambiguous.
No other plausible explanations available for the behavior.
Explicit Versus Implicit Attitudes
Explicit Attitudes:
Consciously endorse and easily report.
Governs how we choose to act.
Implicit Attitudes:
Involuntary, uncontrollable, and sometimes unconscious evaluations.
Influence behaviors that aren't being monitored, such as eye contact or appearing nervous.
Implicit attitudes are rooted more in childhood experiences, whereas explicit attitudes are rooted more in recent experiences.
When Do Attitudes Predict Behavior?
Attitudes can predict behavior, but only under specifiable conditions knowing whether the behavior is spontaneous or planned is key.
Predicting Spontaneous Behaviors
Attitudes will predict spontaneous behaviors only when they are highly accessible to people.
Attitude Accessibility: Strength of the association between an object and an evaluation of it.
Measured by the speed with which people can report how they feel about the object or issue.
Highly accessible attitudes are more likely to predict spontaneous behaviors.
Direct experience with an attitude object leads to more accessible attitudes.
Predicting Deliberative Behaviors
Under these conditions, the accessibility of our attitude is less important.
Theory of Planned Behavior: The best predictor of their behavior is their intention, which is determined by three things: their attitude toward the specific behavior, subjective norms, and perceived behavioral control.
Specific Attitudes
The more specific the attitude toward the behavior in question, the better that attitude can be expected to predict the behavior.
Subjective Norms
People’s beliefs about how others they care about will view the behavior in question.
Perceived Behavioral Control
Ease with which people believe they can perform the behavior.
Asking people about these determinants of their intentions—attitude specificity, subjective norms, and perceived behavioral control—increases our ability to anticipate how they will act.
How Do Attitudes Change?
Attitudes often change in response to social influence as well as our attitudes toward detergent can be influenced by what other people do or say
Changing Attitudes by Changing Behavior: Cognitive Dissonance Theory Revisited
People experience dissonance when they do something that threatens their image of themselves as decent, kind, and honest.
Persuasive Communications and Attitude Change
Persuasive Communication: A message advocating a particular side of an issue.
Yale Attitude Change Approach: The effectiveness of persuasive communications depends on who says what to whom.
The Central and Peripheral Routes to Persuasion
Elaboration Likelihood Model: Specifies when people will be influenced by what the speech says (i.e., the logic of the arguments) and when they will be influenced by more superficial characteristics (e.g., who gives the speech or how long it is).
* Central Route to Persuasion: People are motivated to pay attention to the facts in a communication and carefully think about and process the content of the communication.
* Peripheral Route to Persuasion: People are not motivated to pay attention to the facts but instead notice only the surface characteristics of the message.The key is whether they have both the motivation and the ability to pay attention to the facts.
The Motivation to Pay Attention to the Arguments
Determined by the personal relevance of the topic.
The more personally relevant an issue is, the more willing people are to pay attention to the arguments in a speech and therefore the more likely they are to take the central route to persuasion.
The Ability to Pay Attention to the Arguments
People are swayed more by peripheral cues when they are unable to pay close attention to the arguments.
How to Achieve Long-Lasting Attitude Change
People who base their attitudes on a careful analysis of the arguments will be more likely to maintain this attitude over time, more likely to behave consistently with this attitude, and more resistant to counterpersuasion than people who base their attitudes on peripheral cues.
Emotion and Attitude Change
One way is to grab people’s attention by playing to their emotions to make them watch the ad or be receptive to the message when it comes on or pops up
Fear-Arousing Communications
Aims to change people’s attitudes by arousing their fears
Effective if a moderate amount of fear is created and people believe that listening to the message will teach them how to reduce this fear.
Fear-arousing appeals will fail if they are so strong that they overwhelm people.
Emotions as a Heuristic
Emotions can act as heuristics to determine our attitudes.
How do I feel about it heuristic is a simple rule people use to decide what their attitude is without having to spend a lot of time analyzing every detail about the topic.
Heuristic–Systematic Model of Persuasion: Explanation of the two ways in which persuasive communications can cause attitude change: either systematically processing the merits of the arguments or using mental shortcuts or heuristics.
Emotion and Different Types of Attitudes
Depends on the type of attitude we are trying to change.
Best to fight fire with fire: If an attitude is cognitively based, your best bet is to try to change it with rational arguments; if it is affectively based, you’re better off trying to change it with emotional appeals.
Attitude Change and the Body
Our physical environment and even our body posture play surprising roles in the process of attitude change.
What people are doing when you try to persuade them makes a difference.
The Power of Advertising
Advertising is a direct application of social psychology.
How Advertising Works
If advertisers are trying to change an affectively based attitude, then it is best to fight emotions with emotions.
Make your product personally relevant.
Subliminal Advertising: A Form of Mind Control?
Subliminal Messages: Words or pictures that are not consciously perceived but may nevertheless influence judgments, attitudes, and behaviors.
There is no evidence that the types of subliminal messages encountered in everyday life have regular influence on people’s behavior.
There is evidence that people can be influenced by subliminal messages under carefully controlled laboratory conditions.
Advertising and Culture
Media shapes and reflects cultural attitudes, influencing our attitudes toward various groups.
Advertising strategies work best when tailored to the attitudes and expectations of the target audience.
Cultural differences influence attitudes toward consumer products, reflecting differences in self-concept.
Resisting Persuasive Messages
Attitude Inoculation
Consider arguments against your attitude before someone attacks it to better ward off attempts to change your mind.
By considering "small doses" of arguments against their position, people become more resistant to later, full-blown attempts to change their attitudes.
Being Alert to Product Placement
Make sure to be aware of the product placement and think about how attitude change can be happening.
Alerting people about an upcoming attempt to change their attitudes makes them less susceptible to that attempt.
Resisting Peer Pressure
*Technique to make young people more resistant to attitude change attempts via peer pressure so that they will be less likely to engage in dangerous behaviors.
Inoculating people with samples of the kinds of emotional appeals they might encounter.
When Persuasion Attempts Backfire: Reactance Theory
Sometimes strong prohibitions can backfire and actually cause an increase in interest in the prohibited activity.
Reactance Theory: People do not like feeling that their freedom to do or think whatever they want is being threatened.
When they feel that their freedom is threatened, an unpleasant state of reactance is aroused, and people can reduce this reactance by performing the threatened behavior.