Attitudes and Behavior

Attitudes and Behavior

Traditional Owners Acknowledgement

• Acknowledgement of the traditional owners of the land.
• Respect to elders past, present, and emerging.
• Acknowledgement of the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin nation.

Introduction

• Last week's topic: the self (introspection, observing our own behavior, and social comparison).
• Tutorials: self-sabotage.
• This week's topic: attitudes and behavior.
  • What attitudes are (components, explicit vs. implicit, schema, heuristics, attributions).
  • Where attitudes come from.
• Remember to take notes, as all information is potentially assessable.

What are Attitudes?

• Attitudes are evaluations of people, objects, and ideas.
• They encapsulate positive and negative feelings, beliefs, and behavioral information about attitude objects (e.g., people, frozen pizza).
• Attitudes have three components (the ABCs or the tripartite model):
  • Cognitive component: thoughts and beliefs about the target.
  • Affective component: feelings or emotional reactions towards the target.
  • Behavioral component: behavior towards the target.
• Example: Attitude toward the study of psychology:
  • Cognitive: belief that psychology is useful and conducive to employment.
  • Affective: feeling interested and curious when studying psychology.
  • Behavioral: pursuing extra study or putting in extra work.

ABC Exercise

• Statements to identify as cognitive, affective, or behavioral.
  • "I don't care about cricket" (Cognition).
  • "I find it boring" (Affect).
  • "I don't attend cricket matches" (Behavior).
  • "There should be harsher penalties for drink driving" (Cognition).
  • "I never drink when I'm responsible for driving myself or others" (Behavior).
  • "I am disgusted by drunk drivers" (Affect).
  • "Sharks are scary" (Affect).
  • "Sharks are dangerous" (Cognition).
  • "Sharks should be culled" (Cognition).
• Attitudes may be influenced by one component more than others.
• Components of attitudes can be in conflict.

Explicit vs. Implicit Attitudes

• Explicit attitudes:
  • Attitudes we are aware of.
  • We can consciously endorse.
  • We can control.
  • Example: attitude towards women having careers.
  • Can be reported, but reporting can be controlled (e.g., for social desirability).
  • This can be a problem for researchers.
• Implicit attitudes:
  • Subconscious.
  • Less accessible to conscious awareness.
  • Less susceptible to being controlled.
  • Automatic thoughts, feelings, or behavior when encountering stimuli.
  • Can be in conflict with explicit attitudes.
  • Example: reaction to an image of Clarke Gayford holding his child while Jacinda Ardern does her job.

Measuring Implicit Attitudes

• Measured with reaction time tools.
• Assess how long it takes people to pair words.
• Implicit Association Task (IAT):
  • Multiple blocks with multiple trials.
  • Words are paired on either side of the screen (e.g., men/career vs. women/family).
  • Stimuli appear in the center of the screen (image or word).
  • Participants sort stimuli into categories using keyboard keys.
  • Measures speed and errors.
  • Faster sorting when man and career are paired together suggests a stronger association between men and careers.
  • Assumes participants cannot control their speed, so they cannot give the socially desirable response.
  • Participants don't have to be aware of their attitudes like in a questionnaire.

Criticisms of Implicit Attitudes and the IAT

• Validity and reliability concerns.
  • Construct validity: Is the IAT really measuring implicit bias?
    • Some argue it may be measuring cultural associations instead.
    • The first thought may be what we are conditioned to think, and the next thought defines who we are.
  • Predictive validity: Does the IAT predict behavior?
    • Some research says it does.
    • IATs measuring environmental attitudes distinguish between members of environmental organizations and non-members.
    • Explicit measures may predict behavior we are conscious of, while implicit measures may predict behavior we are not conscious of.
    • Two meta-analyses came to different conclusions, with one suggesting the IAT can predict behavior and another suggesting the relationship is very small.
  • Test-retest reliability: Similarity of scores when participants take the IAT multiple times.
    • Appears to be only 0.6, which is weak.
    • Differences in scores when taking the test in native language vs. another language.
  • Criticisms of the idea that individuals are unaware of their implicit attitudes.

Awareness of Implicit Attitudes

• Low correlations between implicit and explicit measures have been taken as evidence that individuals are unaware of their implicit attitudes.
• However, low correlations could be due to:
  • Ability to control responses on explicit measures.
  • Different content of explicit and implicit measures.
• Studies asking participants to predict their scores on the IAT show that people are able to access their implicit attitudes.
  *Gorensky summarized the evidence in relation to possible criticisms of implicit attitudes in recent article.

Specific Types of Attitudes

Schema and Heuristics

• How do we simplify information to attend to what is important and make decisions quickly?
• Schema:
  • Mental model, representation, or belief about people, objects, situations, and events.
  • Like a mental blueprint for how we expect something to be or behave.
  • Organized body of general information or beliefs developed from direct encounters and secondhand sources.
  • Reduces cognitive work and allows us to go beyond the information given.
  • Can hold schemas about almost anything (individual people, ourselves, recurring events).
  • Event schemas (scripts) allow us to navigate new situations efficiently (e.g., dining at a restaurant).
• Heuristics:
  • Mental shortcuts or rules of thumb used to make decisions and form attitudes quickly.
  • Representativeness heuristic:
    • Deciding whether an example belongs in a class or group based on its similarity to other items in that class or group or its similarity to our mental representation of a category.
    • Example: Judging someone to be a skateboarder based on their appearance.
    • Can be inappropriate to employ sometimes.
    • Example: Judging someone with fashionable sunglasses and a scarf to be a fashion designer rather than a truck driver, even though there are more truck drivers than fashion designers (base rates).
  • Availability heuristic:
    • Evaluating the frequency or likelihood of an event based on how easily instances of it come to mind.
    • Events that occur more often or which we hear about more often come to mind more easily.
    • Assume these events actually happen more frequently.
    • Example: Assuming shark attacks happen a lot because you hear about them often, even though they don't.
    • Example: Answering that more words begin with "k" than end with "k" because it's easier to think of words starting with "k."
      • Schwartz and colleagues experiment:
        • Participants had to write about times they were assertive or unassertive and give six or twelve examples.
        • Then they had to evaluate their own assertiveness, insecurity, or feelings of anxiety.
        • Writing about 12 examples was harder than writing about six examples.
        • Participants who had to recall six examples rated themselves as more assertive in the assertive condition and less assertive in the unassertive condition.
        • In the 12 examples condition, this was reversed.
  • Illusory Correlation:
    • Believing there's an association between two variables when there isn't.
    • Example: Jane's belief that the success of her football team is related to her wearing her lucky jersey.
    • Comes about because individuals ignore common old information and are attracted to novel, distinctive information.

Cognitive Miser vs. Naive Scientist

• The purpose of mental shortcuts is to save us cognitive resources.
• Cognitive miser:
  • Solves problems in a simpler and less effortful way.
  • Makes assumptions and uses stereotyping, schema, and heuristics.
  • Makes automatic judgments about things rather than thinking things through.
• Naïve scientist:
  • Looks for clear and reasonable explanations or justifications of what is happening in the world.
  • Approaches situations on an individual basis and analyzes everything about them.
  • Looks for evidence to substantiate our rational, logical inferences.
• People are flexible social thinkers and can be either a cognitive miser or a naïve scientist depending on our current goals, motives, and needs.
• High need to make a thoughtful decision might lead us to be a naïve scientist.
• If we're in a rush and need to make a fast decision, we might use heuristics.

Motivated Tactician Framework

• Influences whether we pick the naive scientist or the cognitive miser approach.
• Whether the perceiver does one or the other depends on whether they have the time, cognitive resources and information, and whether the decision is important.
• If the perceiver doesn't have time because they need to make a snap judgment, if they're under cognitive load, if they don't have the information to process, and the decision isn't that important, they'll be a cognitive miser.
• But if the perceiver has the time to think things through, they have the cognitive resources to do it, they have information to use, and the decision is an important one, they'll be a naive scientist.

Attributions

• Attributions are our beliefs regarding why an event has occurred.
• Attribution theory says that we often seek to make attributions and know why individual events occur.
• Example: Wondering why a customer service agent sounded sad.
• Example: Attributing a bad mark on an assessment.
  • External/situational attribution: blaming the event on something in the situation that could have been different (e.g., not studying hard enough).
  • Internal/dispositional attribution: blaming the event on a characteristic that is inside you and that cannot be changed (e.g., not being smart enough).
• Actor-observer bias:
  • We tend to make external attributions for our own behavior.
    • Example: Attributing being rude to a poor night's sleep.
  • We tend to make internal attributions for others' behavior.
    • Example: Attributing another person's rudeness to them being a rude person.
  • Reasons:
    • Individuals view themselves as more complex and multifaceted than other people.
    • We have more information about ourselves than we do about other people.
• Sometimes we make internal attributions for our own behavior to make ourselves look better.

Self-Serving Bias

• People are generally motivated to maintain positive views of themselves.
• Whether we make an internal or external attribution will depend on which attribution will make us look better.
• If something bad happened, we make external attributions.
• If something good happens, we make internal attributions.
• Meta-analysis:
  • Large effect size of 0.96.
  • Significant in nearly all samples.
  • Larger in children and older adults compared to middle-aged groups.
  • Larger in US samples compared to Asian samples.
  • Larger in the group with no reported mental health conditions compared to the group with any reported mental health condition.

Cultural Differences in Self-Serving Bias

• May be due to the values and self-construals of the culture.
• Western samples have more individualistic values and independent self-construals.
• Kwa and Tan (2012) examined newspaper and television reports interviewing gold medal winners.
  • US athletes made more attributions to dispositional or internal factors.
  • Chinese athletes made more attributions to situational or external factors.
  • The attributions that people have towards why events happen may depend on culture as well as other differences between people.

Where Attitudes Come From

• Genes.
• Classical conditioning or operant conditioning.
• Family.
• Peers.
• The media.
• Our society and culture.
• Direct experience with the attitude object.
• Process can be explicit or implicit.
• Explanations for attitudes may not be how they actually developed.

Genes

• Yves and Hatami took data from the Virginia 30,000 (a study on health and lifestyle related to twins).
• Genes explained the largest amount of variance in attitudes towards abortion and gay rights.
• Social learning from parents plays a relatively minor long-term role.
• Other attitudes with high heritability: attitudes towards the death penalty, jazz music, censorship, divorce, certain political attitudes, and the importance of religion.
• Genetic influences are probably indirect.
  • Physical and personality variables may influence our attitudes.

Social Learning

• Bandura's social learning theory: new behaviors can be acquired by observing and imitating others.
• Bobo doll experiment:
  • Children who observed an aggressive model beating up the Bobo doll performed more aggressive behavior themselves.
  • Children can learn behaviors merely from observing others.

Conditioning

• Classical conditioning: a stimulus that elicits an emotional response is repeatedly paired with a neutral stimulus until the neutral stimulus takes on the emotional properties of the first stimulus (Pavlov's dogs).
  • Example: Rasran (1938) found that agreement with political slogans was higher for participants who were eating a free meal while they read them.
• Operant conditioning: behaviors that we freely choose to perform become more or less frequent depending on whether they are followed by a reward or positive reinforcement or punishment or negative reinforcement.
• Olsen and Fazio conducted a study to see if they could implicitly classically condition participants to hold certain attitudes:
  • Participants were presented with several 100 images randomly on a computer screen, the target image was always a specific Pokemon.
  • At random points during all these flashing images, the image and name of another Pokemon character would appear along with a positive word and positive images.
  • A different Pokemon character would appear alongside negative words, and negative images.
  • Participants rated the Pokemon paired with the positive stimuli more positively than the Pokemon paired with the negative stimuli.
  • The results suggested that the participants were not aware that these pairings were there in the images they saw.
  • Individuals can be classically conditioned into having a specific explicit attitude, and this can happen without people being aware that they were conditioned.

Direct Experience

• Sometimes we just don't have very strong attitudes towards something before we try it for ourselves.
• Mere exposure:
  • The phenomenon whereby individuals develop a preference or positive attitude towards something merely because they're familiar with it.
  • Attitudes become more positive without us being aware of why it has happened or the fact that our attitude has even changed.
  • First exposure to novel things elicits a fear or avoidance response, but each subsequent exposure causes less fear and more interest.
  • Repeated exposure to an object also increases perceptual fluency.
  • Example: Morgan Stern and colleagues (2013) tested the relationship between exposure to a particular cigarette ad and liking of that cigarette ad.
    • The more times the participant said they had seen the ad, the more they liked it.

Behavior

• Self-perception theory: if we don't know what our attitudes are towards nature, we might think about how we behave around nature.
• What happens when the components of our attitude are in conflict with one another?
• Cognitive dissonance:
  • The feeling of discomfort caused by holding two or more inconsistent cognitions or by performing a behavior that is discrepant from one's self-conception.
  • People have a need to preserve a stable, positive self-image.
  • To deal with cognitive dissonance, there are three kinds of responses we can make:
    • Change our behavior to bring it in line with the cognition we have.
    • Change our cognition to reflect our behavior.
    • Add new cognitions to justify our behavior.
  • Example: Smokers can respond to this dissonance by giving up smoking, revising their cognitions by reducing how dangerous they think smoking is to maintain their behavior.
  • Many of the cognitions we have aren't just solely positive or negative. We often have to compare the pros and cons when we make a decision, and this can be complex.
  • Sophie is in a white dress here, so the theory says that Brad will come to like Sophie even more than he did before the decision so he's not stuck wondering for the rest of his life whether he made the right decision.
  • Brehm (1956) conducted the first study testing the theory that attitude changes to be consistent with behavior:
    • Participants rated products and were given a choice of two of the items they had rated. In conclusion, this shows that even when individuals do have a cognition towards an attitude object initially, their subsequent behavior in relation to that attitude object can strengthen or weaken that cognition.
      *Participants who did cheat became more lenient towards cheater than they were previously.
  • People also change their cognitions to justify the effort they put in or the terrible circumstances they endured.
  • Aronson and Mills (1959) Students that had to go through great ordeal to join a psychology discussion group liked it better than people that just joined without having to do something great.

Summary

• Attitudes are evaluations of people, objects, and ideas.
• Attitudes have three components: affect, cognition, and behavior.
• Attitudes can be either implicit or explicit.
• Schema, heuristics, and attributions give us insight into the kind of attitudes individuals have and how individuals think.
• Attitudes can originate from various sources, including genes, social learning, conditioning, direct experience or mere exposure, and our behavior.
• Tutorial topics include how attitudes are maintained and changed.