Advanced Social Psychology: Attitudes

Attitudes

An attitude is a set of beliefs that we hold in relation to an attitude object such as a person, thing, event or issue. They can be positive or negative or we can have opinions on things without having any strong emotional commitment.

Attitude formation
There are four main ways in which attitudes can form towards some issue event or person etc, these four ways apply mostly when there is no prior existing attitude or knowledge about the thing in question.
Mere exposure- The MEE (zajonc,1968) is the tendency to develop more positive feelings towards a objects and individuals the more we are exposed to them. No action or interaction is required and we don’t need to possess or develop any explicit beliefs about the object. Zejonc experiment included showing participants 10 Chinese people on screen for 2 seconds each, the characters varied in how many times they were presented, some 10 times and other 25, in phase two they were asked to rate the Chinese people and guess whether they were positive or negative in connotation and the people were shown one more time to them and the Chinese people who were shown more were rated more positively than those shown less times, he found a positive linear correlation. This shows that mere exposure had a significant impact on attitudes. There has been many replications of this experiment and the results confirmed this theory. The effect is not limited to visual stimuli but also observed with auditory (Heingartner and hall, 1974) and even food stimuli (Crandall,1970) .Overall the MEE appears to be an important way in which attitudes can form.

Associative learning: 2 ways we learn by association, classical or operant conditioning. Classical conditioning is a learning process that occurs when a neutral stimulus is parted with a stimulus that naturally evokes an emotional response (Pavlov dogs). The previous neutral stimulus after enough pairings with the positive or negative object will acquire a a positivity or negativity of its own.  Staats and Staats(1958)  found that it has a similar effect with social groups as well, they paired the national social category (Dutch) with negative words and ‘Sweden’ with positive words. And they found that the subsequent evaluation of Dutch people was more negative than Swedish and when the Dutch was paired with positive traits they was seen to be more positive. It appeared that the repeated association of Dutch with positive lead to a more positive evaluation of this group-a case of associative learning. Different effect from zajonc’s theory because this shows that a paring with a positive or negative stimulus is required. However the magnitude of the conditioned effect was not great therefore there must be other things helping to form the attitude. A stronger effect is found when an aversive stimuli is placed with a a nonsense word, this is because there is little knowledge known about the nonsense word where people may already have knowledge about different nationality’s forming attitudes so this shows that AL may be a more powerful determinant when there is little knowledge available about the attitude object.  This shows that if we don’t know much about  acertainissue we are going to be more influenced by exposure to certain attitude relevant information, this could explain racism as there is little inter racial contact therefore meeting people with these negative attitudes will influence your own.

The second way is Operant conditioning, this is where behaviour is strengthened following rewards and weakened following punishments (Skinner 1938), this is behavioural in nature: participants must carry out some action that is either rewarded or punished and the same would go for attitudes, if your rewarded for having a specific attitude towards someone your more likely to keep that attitude.
Self perception- The idea behind SPT (Bem 1965) is that we form attitudes from observations of our own behaviour (opinions we openly express on issues) then attributing them to either internal or external causes. Internal causes are more likely when the behaviour was freely chosen just like the attribution theory. Inference of an attitude is more likely to occur when someone has little or no knowledge about the issue at hand or does not hold a strong prior attitude towards it. A study shows this by Chaiten and Baldwin (1981), pps were first pre-screened to assess their attitude towards pro environmental practises-whether attitudes were strong and coherent or weak and inconsistent. This was to test the idea that self-perception of one’s attitude from behaviours would only occur when people had little prior knowledge or opinions at the subject at hand, then they were put into 2 conditions. They asked questions relating to either pro or anti-environmental practises they engaged in getting them to excilit answers in specific ways. After this participants were asked to indicate their own attitude towards environmental practises. Results were consistent with the SPT that those who were induced into reporting behaviours they carried out that were pro environmental in nature were more likely to rate themselves as having pro environmental attitudes and vice vers but for the other only when they had a weak prior attitude, if they had a strong this had no effect.

The idea that people attend to their own behaviour, even facial expression is known as Facial feedback hypothesis, The study by Strack, Martin and stepper (1988) where holding a pen between your teeth gives a expression that your smiling and holding it in your lips makes you frown, they had 2 groups one for each and they were asked to rate how funny the cartoons were and they one between their teeth rated them more funny showing facial expression can effect a attitude. The results form this study seem to suggest that these facial ‘behaviours;, just like any other behaviour can inform subsequent attitudes. Although SPH gives a good explanation for Strack et al’s  findings there is a alternative, Zajonc (1993) argued for a physiological explanation called the vascular theory of emotion, he argued that smiling causes the facial muscles to increase with blood flow to the brain which then creates a positive mood by lowering the brains temperature and the opposite for frowning.

Functional Approach: the three ways discusses so far all operate outside of people’s awareness therefore passive things. However its self-evident that not all attitudes are formed outside of our awareness, sometimes we engage in deliberate thought about a issue to form an opinion. The previous three ways can be the cognitive miser approach however this is the naïve scientist approach. Attitudes are sometimes formed based on the degree to which they satisfy different psychological needs; there are four basic psychological needs that adopting different attitudes can address

Utilitarian function: sometimes attitudes are formed to gain approval from others,, this function created instrumental attitudes, these help us along and make our lives better  e.g. create a positive attitude to parent because the child is totally dependent on them.

Knowledge function: Holding particular attitudes can help us organise and predict our social qorlds, providing a sense of meaning and coherence to our lives, attitudes can be thought of as cognitive schemes, stereotypes for instance can be thought of as attitudes that define our expectations about different social groups.

Ego defensive function: Attitudes formed to satisfy ego defensive psychological needs help people protect themselves from acknowledging threatening self-truths, enabling them to maintain a positive view of themselves e.g. we may develop a a unfavourable attitude towards a co-worker who is enjoying more success than us. These attitudes serve to protect us from acknowledging a potentially damaging social comparison.

Value-expressive function- Finally, sometimes we may develop an attitude that expresses values that are important to us. E.g. we may develop a taste for coffee that we know to have been grown under conditions that allow fair trade of 3^rd world workers, we might come to actually like this taste of coffee because it helps us to express more general beliefs and values that we hold.

Attitudes and behaviours

 In 1934 Richard Lapierre travelled around united states with an Asian couple and at that time there was a widespread prejudice of Asians and he wanted to understand the nature of this negative attitude and whether it predicted discrimination, first he went around US visiting restaurants and hotels to see if they would refuse the Asian couples and only 1 out of 250 did showing low levels of discrimination however these findings were inconsistent with the frequent reports of racial prejudice.  He sent a letter to the same hotel managers and restaurants and asked them if they would serve the Asian couple and of the 128 replies 90 percent said they would not serve the Asian couple. The results from this study show the attitudes does not reflect behaviour.

Determinants of the attitude-behaviour relationship

There are several reasons why there was a discrepancy between the attitudes and actual behaviours performed.

Specificity- In order for attitudes to reflect behaviour they must be on the same level of specificity ( Fishbein &Ajzen 1975) In the study the behaviour assessed was specific (this certain couple) however the attitude was in general (serve Chinese in general). This shows that general attitudes may not reflect specific behaviours.

Time-How much time between attitude measurement and the measurement of behaviour as attitudes can change rather fast so the comparison may become mismatched. Fishbein and Coombs (1974)  Observed that the correlation between attitudes and voting behaviour was stronger one week before voting than one month before election.
Self Awareness- People are capable of experiencing different kinds of self-awareness before carrying out a behaviour and this can affect the relationship between attitudes and behaviour (Echabe & Garate (1994)). People who are privately self aware behave in line with their own attitude maybe because its their own person attitude whereas people with a public self awareness behave in line with the attitude they perceive the majority of other people to hold. Basically act in line when there are alone so behaviours can be predicted however in public people can be acting different. Attitude-behaviour consistency is dependent upon social context-whether private or public are more accessible.
Attitude Accessibility- Private or public awareness is the extent to either private or public attitudes are more accessible and this is affected by the availability heuristic, the easier it is for something to come to mind, the more likely it is that it will affect our behaviour (Fazio 1995). Priming with a a specific type of attitude can have a significant impact on people’s behaviour –stereotype-. The accessibility of attitudes can be measured using response times to answering questions relating to the attitude object: The speed of these responses predicts later behaviour (Look at Fazio and Williams 1986)
Attitude strength:  The stronger someone's attitude is the more likely it will have an effect on behaviour. Attitudes can be held whether they are either strong or weakly held. Irrespective of whether they can be brought easily to mind, for instance a case in the news, suddenly bring issues of euthanasia to the fore, sparking public debates in the media and in friend groups. Attitudes to this subject have therefore become contextually accessible, but people can still vary to which they have either strong opinion on the subject or have little interest. 3 things can affect attitude strength and attitude/behaviour consistency: information, personal involvement and direct experience with the attitude object. Having more information or knowledge about a attitude object means it has a greater attitude strength and behaviour consistency (Chaiken et al 1995). The more personally involved someone is with a issue the more likely it will be that they will act in line with their attitudes (Lieberman and Chaiken 1996). The third reas0j is where people who have creates attitudes via direct experience are more likely to have a stronger attitude and show greater consistencies with behaviour. Important to remember there are other things that effect whether attitudes affect behaviour and see how attitudes affect it in conjunction to other factors

The theory of planned behaviour Ajzen

Developed to account doe the processes by which people consciously decide to engage in specific actions, it states that behavioural intentions are the most proximal determinant of behaviour and that 3 factors converge to predict behavioural intentions. The first is attitudes and these are determined by ones beliefs about the consequences of performing the behaviour and ones evaluation of the possible consequences of performing the behaviour. The second is subjective norms and these are determined by the perceived expectations of significant others and ones motivation to conform to these expectations. The third factor is Perceived control which is determined by ones perception of how easy or difficult it is to perform the behaviour.

According to the model these three factors combine in a interactive way to determine behavioural intention which in turn determines behaviour. We need BI in the model because an important underlying component of the theory is that neither attitudes or norms by themselves can determine behaviour, it is a interaction of these factors with perceived control which predicts attitudes. The link between these three factors and actual behaviour would imply that the particular antecedent could exert some effect on behaviour independent of the other factors, but this isn't the case. Perceived control is the only behaviour that can directly affect behaviour because although knowing how possible it is for you to perform behaviour or not affects intention, it could ultimately reduce the likelihood of actually performing that behaviour, even if intention is strong. The effect of the three factors is not additive, because if one of the three components is strongly anti the behaviour intention will be low and the behaviour will not be carried out.

Reasoned action versus spontaneity

While theory of planned behaviour accounts well for thought out rational decision making it appears less useful in predicting spontaneous, unintentional and habitual types of behaviour. This is linked to the idea of attitude accessibility and linked to the notion that there are many social behaviours we carry out that are automatic, not open to conscious control, and which certainly do not entail much deliberative thought. In many ways we can therefore think of theory of planned behaviour as a model of behavioural predictions for the naïve scientists, with spontaneous behaviours carried out due to habit or gut feeling which is more cognitive misers approach.

Attitude change

Cognitive Dissonance-One of the way attitudes could form was from observations of our own behaviour. Bem's (1965) Self-perception theory  argues that when we have no prior existing attitude in the issue we can infer our attitudes from observing our own behaviour.

Cognitive dissonance theory (Festinger, 1957) argues that behaving in a way that contradicts existing attitudes creates a feeling of discomfort- a behaviour which is inconsistent with a attitude, when this happens it creates a internal imbalance or known as a dissonance, and he suggested people will try and resolve this dissonance, they will look for a way to justify it and if it doesn’t happen they will be forced to change their attitude about it to match the behaviour, like the SP theory this predicts behaviour affect attitudes and not the other way round however unlike SP dissonance will not occur unless there is a prior attitude that is quite strong otherwise there won't be a discrepancy. Festinger and carlsmith (1959) did an experiment to show this, participants have to complete two boring tasks, emptying and refilling a tray with spools and then repeatedly turning 49 wooden pegs on a board, after the hour long task the experimenter explained that it was really about the effects of prior knowledge on perceptions of the task and that they had been allocated to the control condition and in the other condition they were told the participants were told the task was very enjoyable, after the experiment or asked if the pp’s could help out and tell the next participant that they had jsut taken part in it and it was fun and enjoyable, this was key because they were asked to do something which was not in line with their attitudes. Three manipulations took place at this part, some of the participants were asked to lie about the task being enjoyable but were offered different amounts of money for doing so, some from 1 dollar to 20 and some not told to lie and no money, after it was all done participant were then asked to rate how fun and interesting they really found the task to be.

Results varied a lot as a function of lie instruction and payment, control condition (no payment rated the least favourable and this confirms it was really boring, the ones who were given $1 rated it significantly more favourable whereas the $20 did not. These findings are opposite to what would of been predicted by the Operant conditioning theory. By this theory the 20 dollar would of been the best because of the highest positive reward and have the attitude of it being fun reinforced. The pattern of the $1 can be explained by cognitive dissonance. Festinger and carlssmith (1959)  carrying out a behaviour that is inconsistent with an attitude causes discomfort and people are motivated to change it and if no cognitive thing explains it they will change their attitude, with this in mind $1 and $20 represents different levels of justification. In the 20 dollar one people had enough justification to explain why they lied to the participant however in the $1 it was a insufficient justification so the only option they was left was to change their actual attitude towards it.

Factors affecting Dissonance

Justification-Whether people feel they have justification for having behaved in a way that is counter to their attitudes such as the 20 dollar thing.

Freedom of choice-If we are forced to do something this is an explanation for why we did this in contradiction to our attitudes so no dissonance will happen.

Investment: The more invested someone is in their point of view; the more important it is for their self concept and so stronger effects of any dissonance.

SO when there is no justification, we freely choose behaviour and its important to us cognitive dissonances is likely to occur and we are more likely to change our attitudes to fit that behaviour.

Dissonance or self perception

Both say attitudes are formed from behaviours but which is correct? Likely both are but in different situations. Aronson (1969) argues that cognitive dissonance will occur when discrepancies are clear and distinct, the attitude in question is important for the self concept, and when it is not possible to explain away the discrepancy. When the discrepancy are mild and/or attitudes not important to the person then the SP processes are more likely and this consistent with how SP is more likely to operate when people don’t have strong existing attitudes.

Persuasion
This refers to attitude change via external ways and not internal.
Dual Process models of persuasion: To understand how people react and take in persuasive messages go back to the idea of naive scientist and cognitive misers, this dual approach is more successful in explaining when people are or are not persuaded by others. Two models characterize this approach, the elaboration-likelihood model and the heuristic-systematic model (chaiken 1980). They are both slightly different in their emphasis they both argue there are two ways that a persuasive message can cause a attitude change, each differing in the amount of cognitive effort or elaboration they require: The central (systematic) route and the peripheral (heuristic) route. The central route is taken when people are motivated and able to think carefully about the content of the message. Here people are influenced by the strength and quality of the arguments. In contrast the peripheral route is taken when people cant or unwilling to read the message content. Instead people pay attention to the cues that are irrelevant to the content or quality of the communication, such as the attractiveness of the communicator or amount of information presented. Attitudes can change by both routes however attitudes formed via the peripheral route is a lot weaker as there is a lot less personal involvement and less predictive of behaviour (Petty, Haugtvedt and smith 1995) . The two routes capture the definition of the dual process approach to social information processing.

Processing route determinants

As well as the general conditions for the heuristic use e.g. cognitive overload, little information and low self relevance and time pressure there are a number of factors which affect which route will be taken when people process persuasive messages.
Speed of speech:  Rapid speech make it hard to process the content so people abandon the central route and take the peripheral route, relying on just the number of arguments as a heuristic for deciding whether to accept the message.
Mood: in general happy people use the peripheral route while unhappy use the central route this is because negative moods can signal that something is ‘wrong’ which triggers an increase in attention to identify the problem(Bohner, Crow, Erb, and Schwartz 1992). The implication is that happy people are therefore more susceptible to weak cues like attractiveness.
Involvement:  How much the source means to you can have a impact, If the outcome of the argument directly affects the person then they will pay more attention and the central route will be taken. Martin and Hewstone did a study on this (2003) Minorities and Majorities change attitudes in different ways
Individual differences:  Need for cognition (Haugtvedt and Perry 1992)  is the degree to which someone is oriented to engaging in effortful thought. People who are higher in this take the central route and lower take the peripheral route. Similar effects for the need for closure (Kruglanski et al) and need to evaluate (Jarvis and petty 1995).  Differences in self-monitoring (Synder and debono 1985)  can also have an impact. This is the degree to which someone is concerned with what other people think of them. People who are higher in self monitoring will be more likely to take the central route.
Humour:  Relevant humour leads to the central route and irrelevant humour leads to peripheral route (Smith, Haugtvedt and Perry 1994)

Peripheral cues
Once a route is taken it may be persuasive or not depending upon the characteristics of the context. Central route the key determinant is argument quality but if the peripheral route is taken there are 7 characteristics

Physical attractiveness: Chaiken did a experiment that undergraduates to sign a petition a petition to stop university serving meat and those who were attractive were more successful

Similarity to self is an important determinant of attraction similarly in terms of shared attitudes, appearance or social categories can all enhance persuasiveness of a message,(Simons et al 1970).

Source credibility: is a key peripheral cue to determining persuasiveness and likelihood of attitude change, its seen as credible is its expert unbiased and trustworthy. Hovland and weiess (1951) did a study to show this, they found US students who read a article who the author was Robert oppenheimer (( in charge of developing atomic bomb) compared to the same article done by the soviet news agency during the cold war.  However the differences in persuasion caused by credibility tend to diminish over time, this is called the (Sleeper effect). One month after the article was read the test wass done again and the effect of source credibility diminished , the implication is that even non crediable people can influence us...overtime. The explanation is (source memory). The idea is that we don’t only encode information given to us but also who the source of the information is.