attitude
an attitude is a relatively enduring organisation of beliefs, feelings and behavioural tendencies toward socially significant objects, groups, events or signals.
Operational definition: a general disposition to respond to an object in a favourable or unfavourable way.
implications of attitudes
- Attitudes define a person’s position towards a given aspect of their social world.
- Attitudes are relatively stable
- Three different components of attitudes.
a. Cognitive
b. Affective - feeling
c. Behavioural
Attitudes directed towards socially significant stimuli.
direct attitude measures
- Open ended questions
○ Advantages: simple, lots of data
○ Disadvantages: time consuming, differences in expressiveness.- Closed questions (e.g. likert, semantic differential scales)
○ Advantages: easy, quick
○ Disadvantages: response sets.
§ People may circle all 7’s thus it is not valid.
- Closed questions (e.g. likert, semantic differential scales)
indirect attitude measures
- Participants unaware that attitude being assessed (lost letter technique)
○ Lost contentious letters and found that people picked up and mailed letters that were addressed to more socially acceptable organisations.- Physiological measures (pupil dilation, fMRI etc.)
- Duping the participant (bogus pipeline).
○ Participants were hooked up to what they thought was a lie detector and assessed what people really think about a specific issue. - Cognitive research methods (implicit association)
○ If you have a favourable attitude towards something, you’re more likely to connect stimuli faster. - Overt behaviour
○ Studies that analyse who people sit with/associate with etc.
LaPiere (1934)
§ Research travelled with a Chinese couple in the US, and assessed how many establishments responded to Chinese guests. In general, behaviours were very positive and they were only rejected once. However, he later sent a survey asking the establishments whether they would accept Chinese guests, and the majority was no. thus, found that there was a discrepancy between attitude and behaviour.
TRA
- Theory of reasoned action (Fishbein & Ajzen, 1975).
○ Intention: a subjective estimate of the probability that one will perform a certain behaviour
○ Attitude: how favourable or unfavourable a person feels towards the behaviour.
○ Subjective norm: perceived social pressure to perform or not perform the behaviour.
TPB
○ Perceived behavioural control (PBC)- perceived ease and control over performing or not performing the behaviour.
attitude change
- Two models of attitude change
a. Elaboration likelihood model of persuasion
b. Heuristic-systematic model- Behaviour-induced attitude change
a. Cognitive dissonance theory
- Behaviour-induced attitude change
yale studies
- Communicator (where is the message coming from).
- Message
- Channel
- Audience
communicators
- Credibility of the source
○ Bochner and Insko (1966)
§ Focused on understanding credibility. Looked at whether people could be persuaded to change their attitudes about the amount of sleep we need per day. Looked at a high credibility source and a low credibility source.○ The sleeper effect. § Sleeper effect states that over time we forget the credibility of the source and thus attitudes stabilise. § The source becomes less important overtime.
attractiveness of the commuunicator
(DeBono & Telesca, 1990).
○ Side of women attractive or made to look unattractive.
○ Strong and weak message
○ Attractive source related in stronger message attitude.
○ Strongest is a strong message delivered by an attractive source.
message
- Fear
○ Inverted U
§ Curvilinear relationship between fear and attitude change.
§ A certain amount of fear would achieve persuasion.
§ Difficult to identify optimal level of fear- other factors may need to be considered as influencing the fear-persuasion relationship.
§ Males are more likely to say that others would be more influenced by fear based messaging.
§ Women stated that they were more likely to be influenced than others.
Protection Motivation theory (Rogers, 1983).
- Motivation to protect oneself from health threat influenced by
○ Severity of event
○ Probability of event
○ Response efficacy
○ Self efficacy beliefs.
Fear vs Humour
- Humour vs fear based approaches - Relative effectiveness of humour for males - Need to ensure that the humour is appropriate but cannot be tied to serious consequences.
channel
- Message medium
- Source effects may depend on the channel.
- Complex messages are more beneficial when written
audience
- Intelligence- depends on message complexity
- High intelligence is persuaded more by complex, sound messages.
- Self esteem (curvilinear= low self esteem unlikely to be persuaded, high self esteem unlikely as well).
- Mood; influences message processing
○ Good mood = more likely to be persuaded (peripheral cues- already in a good mood and don’t want to change that (fear based messages unlikely to work).
models of persuasion
- Elaboration likelihood model (petty & Cacioppo).
○ Central vs peripheral route.
○ Key determinant is the elaboration - how likely are we to may attention or think the message applies to us.- Heuristic-systematic model (chaiken)
○ Systematic vs heuristic processing
- Heuristic-systematic model (chaiken)
cognitive dissonance theory
- Festinger, 1957.
- Behaviour may induce attitude change
- People motivated to maintain consistency among cognitive elements.
- Remove dissonance by:
○ Change attitude
○ Change behaviour
○ Justify dissonance.
effort justification paradigm
○ Aronson & Mills, 1959.
§ Prepared some women for a severe discussion. Those with the severe initiation said that the discussion was more interesting, thus justifying their behaviour.
induced compliance paradigm
○ Induced (or forced) compliance paradigm
§ Festinger and Carlsmith, 1959.
§ 2 simple motor tasks performed for half an hour
§ Offered participants either $1 or $20 to tell next person that the task was enjoyable.
Participants then rated the task.
Found that those given the $20 rated it as more boring than others as they “only did the task for the money as it was boring”. On the other hand, the $1 participants had to convince themselves the task was more interesting as a way to justify their participation all for a mere $1.
cognitive consistency theory
A group of attitude theories stressing that people try to maintain internal consistency, order and agreement among their various cognitions.
balance theory
According to Heider, people prefer attitudes that are consistent with each other, over those that are inconsistent. A person (p) tries to maintain consistency in attitudes to, and relationships with, other people (0) and elements of the environment (xx).
theory of reasoned actions
Fishbein and Ajzen’s model of the links between attitude and behaviour. A major feature is the proposition that the best way to predict a behaviour is to ask whether the person intends to do it.
- The theory of reasoned action is based on the broad processes of beliefs, intention and action and includes the following:
○ Subjective norm: a product of what the individual perceives others to believe. Significant others provide direct or indirect information about ‘what is the proper thing to do’.
○ Attitude towards the behaviour- a product of the individual’s belief about the target behaviour and of how these beliefs are evaluated.
○ Behavioural intention- an internal declaration to act.
Behaviour- the action performed
theory of planned behaviour
Modification by Ajzen of the TRA. Suggests that predicting a behaviour from an attitude measure is improved if people believe they have a control over that behaviour.
self-efficacy
Expectations that we have about our capacity to succeed in particular tasks.
attitudes vs behaviour
- As attitudes are being formed, they correlate more strongly with a future behaviour when:
○ The attitudes are accessible (easy to recall)
○ The attitudes are stable over time
○ People have had a direct experience with the attitude object
○ People frequently report their attitudes.
