Psychology 320 Lecture 6: Accessibility, Automaticity, and Consistency Theories

Overarching Factors in Psychology

• Psychology and everyday life are influenced by three primary factors:

  • Attention: We are rarely paying $100\%$ attention to our surroundings or information being conveyed; distractions like cell phones affect our sensory intake.

  • Perception: This is based on the idea that seeing an "attitude object" activates specific neurons in the brain. This activation creates a cascading effect, triggering other relevant information.

  • Introspection: The process of analyzing why we perform certain actions. Making introspection a habit helps in programming oneself to make better split-second decisions and proper attributions for behavior.

The Nature of Perception and Interpretation

• Constructive Perception: Perception is determined not just by visual or sensory input, but by how that information is processed. We react based on our perception of a stimulus rather than the stimulus itself.

• Neural Activation: Perception parses together current sensory input and everything related to it in the brain. If attention is low, the wrong categories may be activated.

• Previous Learning: Interpretation is swayed by conditioning, learning, and biases built over years (often $10$ to $15$ years). The strongest neural links are those most often activated or those that are value-expressive.

• Cross-Modalities: This explains the phenomenon where rubbing one's eyes while they are shut causes the perception of flashes of light. Even though the stimulus is physical touch, the brain transduces it into electrical information that activates neurons typically reserved for light, leading to the perception of light.

Accessibility and Categorization

• Bruner (1957): Asserted that the likelihood of sensory input being categorized into a specific category depends on the "fit" between the input and the category specifications.

• Fit and Accessibility: When fit is equally good for two non-overlapping categories (e.g., shapes vs. colors), the more accessible category will capture the input. This category is determined by pride (temporary) or normal prejudgments (permanent).

• Priming Example (Subtle Sorting):

  • If a person is primed with colors (red, blue, pink) and then asked to sort a group of shapes (squares, triangles, rectangles) in various colors (red, orange, blue), they are more likely to sort by color category rather than shape.

  • Without priming, sorting depends on the individual's previous "programming" or which fit they find better.

Research on Accessibility and Self-Reports

• Questionnaire Framing Study:

  • Open-ended question: When asked "What is the most important thing for children to prepare them for life?", only $4.6\%$ of participants mentioned "thinking for themselves."

  • Multiple-choice question: When given the option, $61.5\%$ of participants agreed that thinking for themselves is important. This demonstrated an availability heuristic.

• Dating Frequency and Life Satisfaction:

  • Group 1 asked about life satisfaction first: Very little correlation between dating and satisfaction ($-0.12$).

  • Group 2 asked about dating frequency first: A very strong correlation was found ($+0.66$). The frequency of dating became the most accessible category for judging life satisfaction.

• The Assertiveness Study (Schwarz et al.):

  • Group 1: Name $6$ times they were assertive (Easy task).

  • Group 2: Name $12$ times they were assertive (Difficult task).

  • Results: Group 1 rated themselves as significantly more assertive because they could easily fulfill the requirement ($5$ out of $6$). Group 2 rated themselves as less assertive because finding $12$ examples was difficult ($5$ out of $12$), leading to a judgment based on ease of retrieval (availability heuristic).

Priming and Social Judgment

• Primary Definition: Priming occurs when recently activated information remains accessible and affects the interpretation of new information.

• The "Donald" Study (Higgins, Rholes, & Jones, 1977):

  • Step 1: Participants perform a scrambled sentence task with words related to hostility/aggression ($0\%$, $20\%$, or $80\%$ hostile words).

  • Example Scramble: "her, he, bit, kicked" $\rightarrow$ "he bit her" or "he kicked her."

  • Step 2: Participants read a story about "Donald," whose behavior is ambiguous (e.g., refusing to pay rent until a landlord repaints, demanding money back from a clerk).

  • Results: Those primed with $80\%$ hostile words rated Donald as much more hostile compared to the $20\%$ or $0\%$ groups. These results were replicated after $12$ and $24$ hours.

• Subliminal Priming: A vigilance task where hostile words are flashed for less than $400\,ms$ (below conscious awareness) with backward masking. Results showed that the greater the percentage of subliminal hostile words, the more negatively participants rated Donald.

Models of Attitude Accessibility

• Chronic Accessibility: Some concepts are permanently accessible due to intense learning or associations. This may essentially function as an attitude.

• Fazio’s Non-Dimensional Model: Attitudes consist of an object connected to beliefs, which are then connected to evaluations. Over time, the attitude becomes the sum of all beliefs and evaluations. Eventually, this sum becomes automatic.

• Associative Network Models: Activation of one node (e.g., "rose") spreads to related nodes (e.g., "red," "flower"). Activation of a concept inhibits unrelated or contradictory concepts.

• Parallel Constraints/Parallel Distributed Process (PDP) Model: Connections lead to both activation and inhibition. Information is processed until a stable state emerges. Elements (like the color "red") are reused across the entire network rather than stored separately for every object.

Automatic Processing and Priming

• Four Pillars of Automaticity:

  1. Lack of awareness.

  2. Lack of intention.

  3. Lack of control.

  4. Lack of effort (efficiency).

• Sequential Priming: A prime related to a target speeds up processing (Association-based).

  • Example: "Nurse" followed by "Doctor" triggers a faster reaction than "Nurse" followed by "Bread."

• Evaluative Priming: Positive primes speed up reactions to positive targets, while negative primes speed up reactions to negative targets.

• Late Positive Potential (LPP): It takes approximately $400\,ms$ for the brain to shift from processing positive information to negative information (or vice versa), which can be measured as a neural potential.

• Fazio’s Orienting Value of Attitudes: Highly accessible (strong) attitudes attract attention automatically. In a study, participants remembered seeing objects they had strong attitudes toward (good or bad) more often than objects they had weak attitudes toward.

Implicit vs. Explicit Attitudes

• Implicit Attitudes (Greenwald & Banaji): Learned associations and strengths of connections and patterns in the brain. They are built up passively over years.

• Explicit Attitudes: Conscious, stated beliefs that involve weighing pros and cons.

• Controlling Automatic Routes: Deliberation allows switching from automatic to controlled processing, but requires Motivation and Ability (e.g., being well-rested, fed, or caffeinated).

• Stimulus Onset Asynchrony (SOA): Measurement of time between the start of two stimuli. Studies show that at longer SOAs (e.g., $450\,ms$), responses align more with explicit attitudes; at short SOAs (e.g., $0\,ms$ to $150\,ms$), they align with implicit attitudes.

Consistency Theories: Heider’s Balance Theory

• Equilibrium: Humans strive for harmony between beliefs and behaviors. Discomfort arises from inconsistency.

• Heider’s Balanced Triads (POX Model):

  • P: Person (target).

  • O: Other Person.

  • X: Attitude Object.

• Relationships: Can be positive ($+$) or negative ($-$).

• Rule of Balance: A triad is balanced if the number of positive signs is odd ($1$ or $3$). It is imbalanced if the number of positive signs is even ($0$ or $2$).

• Balanced Triads:

  1. $P+O, P+X, O+X$ (Friends who like the same thing).

  2. $P+O, P-X, O-X$ (Friends who dislike the same thing).

  3. $P-O, P+X, O-X$ (Enemies where P likes something O hates).

  4. $P-O, P-X, O+X$ (Enemies where P hates something O likes).

• Imbalanced Triads:

  1. $P+O, P+X, O-X$ (Friends where one likes and one dislikes an object).

  2. $P-O, P+X, O+X$ (Enemies who both like the same thing).

• Reducing Imbalance: Individuals may persuade the other to change, change their own attitude about the object, or change their relationship with the other person.

• Zajonc’s Pleasantness Rule: Triads are rated most pleasant when there is both Attraction (friendship) and Agreement.

Festinger’s Cognitive Dissonance Theory

• Cognitive Dissonance: An unpleasant state caused by holding two inconsistent relevant cognitions.

• Irrelevant vs. Relevant: Thoughts must be related to cause dissonance (e.g., "I love ice cream" and "I am lactose intolerant").

• Conditions for Dissonance: Must involve physiological arousal, attribution of that arousal to the self, and a perceived inconsistency.

• The Fox and the Grapes: Aesop's fable where a fox, unable to reach grapes, decides they are "sour" to justify his inability to get them.

• Maladaptive Coping (Smoking Example):

  • A smoker knows smoking is bad (dissonant cognition).

  • To reduce dissonance, they add consonant cognitions: "It reduces my anxiety," or "The joy is worth the risk."

  • Alternatively, they downplay dissonant ones: "My grandma smoked and lived to be $95$."

Classical Dissonance Paradigms

• Belief Disconfirmation Paradigm (Festinger’s Cult Study):

  • A cult believed a flood would destroy the world and aliens would save them. When the flood didn't happen, members who were alone quit the cult. Members who were together increased their faith (proselytizing) to bolster consonant cognitions and protect their self-concept.

• Insufficient Justification Paradigm (Aronson & Carlsmith):

  • Children forbidden from playing with a toy with either a Mild or Severe threat.

  • Results: Children with the severe threat still liked the toy (external justification: "I didn't play because I'd get in trouble"). Children with the mild threat liked the toy less (internal justification: "I didn't play because the toy isn't that cool").

• Effort Justification (Hazing and Initiation):

  • Groups receiving severe electric shocks to join a boring discussion group (about milk or clinical sex) rated the group as much more interesting than those who received mild shocks.

  • Internal justification: "I wouldn't have suffered those shocks for a boring group; therefore, this group must be great."

• The $1/$20 Study (Festinger & Carlsmith, 1959):

  • Task: Turn pegs a quarter-turn for an hour, then move thread between bobbins.

  • Condition 1 (Control): Task rated as boring ($-0.45$ enjoyment).

  • Condition 2 ($20$): Paid "$200$ modern dollars" to lie and tell the next person the task was fun. Rated the task as boring because they had sufficient external justification for lying.

  • Condition 3 ($1$): Paid small amount to lie. These participants rated the task as significantly more enjoyable ($+1.35$) because they had insufficient external justification and had to create internal justification: "I didn't lie for a dollar; I must have actually liked the task."

Post-Decisional Dissonance and Spreading of Alternatives

• Approach-Approach Conflict: Choosing between two equally liked objects creates dissonance regarding the unchosen one.

• Spreading of Alternatives: After a choice, the chosen item increases in desirability and the rejected item decreases.

• Appliance Study: Choosing between two appliances ranked as "$5$ and $6$." Later, the chosen one is ranked higher (e.g., $6.5$) and the rejected one lower (e.g., $4.5$).

• Sticker Study (4-year-olds):

  • Children rank stickers A, B, and C as equally positive.

  • Day 1: Choice between A and B. Child chooses A.

  • Day 2: Choice between B and C. Child chooses C $2/3$ of the time because sticker B was downplayed during the previous day's dissonance reduction.

• Relationships: Dissonance theory suggests that you don't just choose who you love, you love who you choose to justify the decision. Removing a choice from a partner can move them toward wanting you more to regain that lost option.