Persuasive Communication Quiz 1 (Weeks 1-5)

functional approaches to studying attitudes

"Functional approaches attempt to identify the various psychological benefits that people can and do derive from forming, expressing, and changing their attitudes"

4 approaches to defining attitudes

1. Rokeach's Tripartite Model of Attitudes 2. Zanna and Rempel's Single-Factor Model 3. Fishbein and Ajzen's Attitude toward Behavior Model 4. Schwarz's Construal Model

Fishbein and Ajzen's Attitude toward Behavior Model

- F and A developed the concept of attitude toward the behavior, which is a more narrow construction of the attitude-behavior relationship - F and A provided a more precise description of the influence of individual beliefs on people's attitudes and how they relate to behavioral intentions - they argued that an attitude toward a behavior was a function of the perceived consequences of performing the behavior and evaluation of those consequences (AB = ∑(bi x ei)

reasoned action theories

- F argued that the best predictor of behavior (B) was not attitudes, but instead an individual's intention to perform a particular behavior (BI) - theory of reasoned action was intentionally designed to predict behavioral intentions toward specific objects or situations - over time, this was expanded and became known as the Theory of Planned Behavior

Rokeach's Tripartite Model of Attitudes (basis and implications)

- R defines an attitude as a relatively enduring organization of beliefs around an object or situation predisposing one to respond in some preferential manner - implications: attitudes are relatively enduring; attitudes are a cluster of beliefs; an attitude, as a combination of beliefs about an object or situation, represents a predisposition to respond - R's definition presumes that attitudes have affective, behavioral, and cognitive components (3 components is why it's called Tripartite) - affective component represents people's +, -, or neutral evaluations of attitude objects (eg evaluative beliefs) - behavioral component represents the behaviors people have due to their attitudes of the attitude object - cognitive component represents the beliefs (particularly descriptive beliefs) that a person has about an attitude object - problems with this model: attitudes do not always predict behaviors

Schwarz's Construal Model

- The most recent approach to defining attitude was developed by scholars who argue that attitudes are a context-sensitive automotive evaluation - labeled "construal" because it assumes that contextual and situational factors determine attitudes - reject the idea that attitudes are enduring representations of an object that create a predisposition to respond - people do not "have" attitudes that they carry with them from one situation or context to another - many theories presume that our behavior is determined in important ways by the specific situation we find ourselves in

comparing the 4 approaches to defining attitudes

- Tripartite Model (Rokeach) and the Attitude toward Behavior Model (Fishbean and Ajzen) conceptualize an attitude as a relatively enduring combination of beliefs about a particular object, situation, or behavior - key distinction between the single-factor model (Z and R) and more traditional approaches is whether or not an attitude is assumed to predict (eg: change) behavior - construal model differs strongly from these traditional conceptualizations bc it rejects the notion that attitudes are relatively enduring and argues that attitudes do not cause behavior - authors believe that the Tripartite Model and the Attitude toward Behavior Model offer the greatest utility for studying persuasive comm.

Zanna and Rempel's Single-Factor Model

- Z and R note that the most important problem with the tripartite model is that it presumes that attitudes, by definition, are related to behaviors - Z and R defined attitude as "as the categorization of a stimulus object along an evaluative dimension based upon, or generated from, three general classes of information: (1) cognitive information, (2) affective/emotion information, and/or (3) information concerning past behaviors or behavioral intentions" - Z and R posit that attitudes are composed of a single evaluative dimension (eg: good-bad) rather than descriptive, prescriptive, and evaluative

belief

- a single proposition/statement about an object or situation - the content of a belief usually describes the object as something that is correct or incorrect, good or bad, moral or immoral, or the like - 3 types of beliefs: descriptive, prescriptive, evaluative

attitude

- a theoretical construct created by social scientists to explain why people react differently to similar objects or situations - not directly observable and, hence, more difficult to measure than behaviors

opinions

- a view or judgment formed about something; not necessarily based on fact or knowledge - evaluative or feeling oriented - includes notions of good/bad, right/wrong - an opinion statement often has the word "should" in it - eg: "Abortion should be legal in all 50 states" - we have so many opinions - most research is here - eg: "It is good that it is raining because we are in a drought" "It is bad that the resources of this country are being depleted"

direct experience (as a moderator variable in attitude formation)

- attitudes formed through personal experience with an object or situation will be more strongly related to subsequent behaviors than attitudes formed through more indirect experiences - direct experience moderates (either lessens or intensifies) the size of the attitude-behavior correlation - people design their persuasive messages to appeal to the experiences and personal interests of message recipients

the theories of reasoned action and planned behavior provide strong support for the proposition that *3 things* are important predictors of a person's behavior

- attitudes, subjective norms, and perceived behavioral control - by the 1990s, these theories replaced speculation about the existence of an attitude-behavior relationship

repeated-measures experimental design

- critical feature of repeated-measures designs is the use of multiple assessments (or measurements) of the DV - both single-factor experiments and factorial designs can incorporate repeated measures of the DV

nonexperimental design

- critics of nonexperimental investigations sometimes engage in fallacious reasoning, arguing that one cannot draw causal inferences by using only correlational data -

values

- enduring (continuing or long-lasting) notions that control large numbers of attitudes/behaviors (umbrella notion) - we have a relatively small number of values - people vary in their intensity of the same value - very hard to change someone's values - fundamental level

quasi-experimental design

- for many studies, it is possible to experimentally control one or more of the IVs under consideration but impossible to randomly assign participants to experimental conditions - because quasi-experiments do not involve random assignment of participants to treatment conditions, they cannot assume that participants in different treatment groups are similar when the study begins

Triandis (1980) argues that, of the several factors to consider in attempting to predict behavior, the most important is...

- habit → behaviors that have become automatic in certain situations - T suggests that the first few times a person performs a particular behavior, cognitive factors (such as attitudes and norms) play a significant role in determining the nature of the behavior; but as the person engages more and more in the behavior, there is a shift away from these cognitive factors

locus control and persuasion

- locus control is the degree to which people believe that they, as opposed to external forces, have control over the outcome of events in their lives - those who score higher on external locus of control tend to be more easily persuaded, socially influenced, and conforming than those who score as internal the locus of control

disguised self-report

- people provide verbal reports about themselves, but they are unaware that the purpose of the self-report is to measure their attitudes - eg: if you want to measure a person's attitudes toward the church, you might show the person a picture of a minister and ask the person to make up a story about the picture; the idea behind this projective technique is that people will project their own personal feelings into their stories

self-monitoring and persuasion

- self-monitoring is the extent to which people monitor their self-presentations, expressive behavior, and nonverbal affective displays - people low in self-monitoring typically show greater attitude-behavior consistency than people who are high in the trait because low self-monitors tend to guide their behavioral choices based on salient information about their internal states (eg: they eat when they are hungry), whereas high self-monitors tend to guide their behavior more on the basis of situational information (eg: they eat when it's dinner time) - low self-monitoring = high attitude-behavior consistency - high self-monitoring = low attitude-behavior consistency

bogus pipeline

- sometimes, people don't want to tell you about their attitudes - psychologists have searched far and wide for a way to ensure that the self-report attitude scales really reflect a person's true feelings, and the bogus pipeline is one way - bogus pipeline: an investigator convinces the subject that the sophisticated equipment being used allows a determination of the subject's true attitudes - the subjects are hooked up to an EMG, and the researchers tell them that the EMG "predicts" the subject's true answers (it doesn't) - the logic of this is that a subject will likely prefer to tell the researcher their true feelings rather than be proven a liar by the EMG

theory of planned behavior

- specifies a model where three theoretical components combine to determine a person's behavioral intention (BI) - 3 components: 1. the individual's attitude toward performing the particular behavior (AB) 2. existing subjective norms (SN) → the influences that the social world has on a person's behavioral intentions 3. perceived behavioral control (PC) → the belief that one can perform the behavior in question - BI = f (W1AB + W2SN + W3PC)

attitude accessibility (as a cognitive moderator variable in attitude formation)

- the extent to which an attitude is activated automatically from memory - Fazio and colleagues (1984) have demonstrated that when a person repeatedly expresses an attitude toward an object or situation, it becomes chronically accessible - the more often an attitude is expressed, the more readily it is recalled from memory - eg: a person who actively works to promote legislation regarding abortion rights is likely to express pro-choice opinions more frequently than someone who holds an identical attitude but who is less actively involved in the issue

beliefs

- the information that a person has about other people, objects, and issues - what the target audience thinks to be true or false - may be factual or an opinion - could get facts to support (but be careful for misinformation in propaganda or fake news) - if you can look it up/find facts or data, then it is a belief - can have beliefs about the past, present, or future - hard to change someone's beliefs - fundamental level - eg: "The world was created in seven days" "It will be cold tomorrow" "The lack of renewable energy is causing world-wide inflation" "We didn't go to the moon"

construct differentiation (as a cognitive moderator variable in attitude formation)

- the number of different dimensions along which people judge objects and situations - someone with a highly sophisticated construct system cites a greater variety of attributes when describing a person, object, event or situation than those with less developed construct systems - O'Keefe and Delia (1981) argued that people with more developed construct systems should demonstrate lower attitude-behavior intention correlations and people with less developed construct systems are more likely to demonstrate a strong relationship between attitudes and behavioral intentions - in simpler terms, people with highly differentiated construct systems are able to logically behave in a manner that might seemingly be inconsistent with the related attitude

the difference between persuasion and coercion & manipulation centers on...

- the receiver's free will - it's difficult to separate these constructs because (1) "much persuasive discourse is indirectly coercive" and (2) there can be a disagreement on the degree of free will the receiver actually has in the situation

dependent variable (DV)

- the research variable influenced by the independent variable and the impact can be measured - many times, research begins by investigating how one independent variable influences a single dependent variable

response-reinforcing

- think of AA - the mainstay of the advertising industry bc, although some ad campaigns introduce new products and services, most advertising dollars are spent maintaining brand loyalty - also play a key role in the maintenance of social, political, and religious institutions (religious services are designed to reinforce beliefs of a prescribed doctrine and maintain lifestyles consistent with that doctrine) - difficult to observe

response-shaping

- think of Obama's and Carter's presidential campaigns - important because we are routinely exposed to new objects, people, and issues that require us to form new attitudes - predominantly take place through social learning (how people form responses to stimuli by modeling others' behavior after observing the + and - outcomes associated with that behavior) - the change is from no response to some response

response-changing

- think of when people join cults (new members experience changes that clearly reflect the response-changing dimension of persuasion as their existing attitudes, beliefs, values, and behaviors are exchanged for new ones) - most response-changing processes evolve slowly over time -the change is from one (existing) response to another (different) response

Herek's Attitude Function Inventory (AFI)

- to reflect these experiential, defensive, and symbolic functions of attitudes toward LGBTQ+ people, Herek developed and validated the AFI to measure the psychological foundations of attitudes and their functions - 3 dimensions: experiential-schematic (knowledge function), defensive (ego-defensive function), value-expressive (symbolic function)

vested interest

- vested interest → the extent to which the message topic influences a person's life - when people have a vested interest in a given issue, their attitude about it would more likely correspond with their behavior (A-B correlation would be strong) - eg: Sivacek and Crano's legal drinking study

A and F (1977) noted that a behavior consists of four elements (TACT)

1. The action performed -- is the behavior one of cooking, smoking, or driving? 2. the target at which the action is directed -- is the action directed at a cake, a cigarette, or a bus? 3. the context in which the action is performed -- is the action performed in the kitchen, in front of the minister, or on the highway? 4. time -- is the action performed on New Year's Eve, in the morning, or at noon? - by putting these components together, the complete behavior is specified -- the person is cooking a cake in the kitchen in the morning - in order to predict a behavior, A and F argue that the attitude measure employed should correspond to the behavior on the action, target, context, and time categories - if there is no correspondence, a significant relationship between attitudes and behaviors will usually not be obtained

3 types of attitudes

1. beliefs 2. opinions 3. values

4 ways for researchers to ensure they are reporting truthfully about their attitudes

1. bogus pipeline (direct attitude measure) 2. indirect attitude measure 3. disguised self-report 4. information error test

2 fundamentally different routes to changing a person's attitudes

1. central route: emphasizes the information that a person has about the person, object, or issue under consideration; changes in attitude using the central route tend to be more permanent 2. peripheral route: emphasizes just about anything else (eg: information about the communicator or about the immediate consequences of adopting a certain attitude)

3 general biasing factors that may be confounded with an experimental manipulation

1. demand characteristics: when the experimental treatment gives the subject a hint about the "correct" response or the response that the experimenter would like the subject to make 2. evaluation apprehension: when the experimental treatment makes the subjects concerned about being evaluated by the experimenter, which then makes subjects more likely to engage in a social desirable response 3. experimenter bias: when the experimenter's behavior, rather than the experimental manipulation, influences the subjects' response

the procedures for measuring attitudes can generally be divided into two major categories

1. direct procedures (a person is asked to provide a self-report of his or her attitude) 2. indirect procedures (an attempt is made to measure a person's attitude without the person knowing it)

researchers discovered that three factors that account for most of the meaning we assign to different words

1. evaluation (how good or bad, valuable or worthless something is) 2. potency (how strong or weak, heavy or light something is) 3. activity (how fast or slow, excitable or calm something is)

3 basic research design categories

1. experimental 2. quasi-experimental 3. nonexperimental

2 design characteristics that distinguish experimental, quasi-experimental, and nonexperimental research designs

1. experimental control -- experimental and quasi-experimental investigations control (or manipulate) at least one IV (hypothesized to be the cause) in order to determine its influence on 1+ DVs (hypothesized to be influenced by the independent variables; if a study involves the experimental control of an IV, then it is classified as an experimental or quasi-experimental investigation; nonexperimental designs involve no such control and instead the researchers measure 1+ IVs 2. random assignment -- the difference between an experiment and a quasi-experiment rests on the use of random assignment of research participants to experimental conditions; with random assignment (if there are no systematic differences among participants), any differences arising after the experiment can be attributed to the experimental treatment (manipulation) because everything else is assumed constant

3 measures in the human body's natural physiological responses to attitudinal stimuli

1. galvanic skin reflex (GSR) -- measures the electrical resistance of the skin, or how well the skin conducts an electric current that is passed between two electrodes that are usually placed on the surface of the hand; when the hand is sweaty, it conducts electricity better than when it is dry; because people perspire more when emotionally aroused, it was thought that the GSR could be used to assess a person's emotional response to a stimulus 2. pupillary response -- Hess suggested that pupillary expansion would accompany the repeated presentations of stimuli that the person liked (and vice versa) 3. facial EMG -- a measure of the contractions of the major facial muscles; Cacioppo and Petty (1979) reasoned that measures of facial EMG might distinguish + from - reactions to a persuasive communication

4 common types of variables in persuasive research

1. independent 2. dependent 3. intervening (sometimes called mediating) 4. moderator

4 psychological fucntions that attitudes serve

1. instrumental/adjustive/utilitarian function (reflected in the + attitudes people develop toward objects or situations that are rewarding and the - attitudes they associate with the situations producing unfavorable outcomes) 2. ego-defensive function (serves to protect people from basic truths about themselves and their environments that they prefer not to even deal with or face) 3. knowledge function (enable us to organize information and structure our evaluation of novel stimuli) 4. value-expressive function (a means of establishing and maintaining norms of social appropriateness)

2 types of reviews in persuasion literature

1. narrative summaries 2. meta-analytic summaries

2 types of experimental designs that are most often used to study attitude change

1. pretest-posttest control group design 2. posttest-only control group design

3 goals of persuasion

1. shape 2. reinforce 3. change

4 kinds of validity of concern to an investigator when evaluating the outcome of any experiment

1. statistical conclusion validity -- asks whether the difference observed between the experimental and control groups may have been due to a chance fluctuation, or whether the observed difference is reliable (likely to happen again) 2. internal validity -- if the experiment passes the conclusion validity test, something other than chance is responsible for the observed difference 3. external validity -- concerned with how well the observed effect generalizes to other possible subject populations, other locations, and different experimental materials; the only way to check the external validity of a finding is to conceptually replicate the experiment 4. construct validity -- the question of whether or not what was meant to be manipulated was actually manipulated and what was meant to be measured was actually measured; researchers typically deal with construct validity and confounds in one or both of the following ways: (1) manipulation check and (2) multiple operations

other than ensuring correspondence between the measures of attitude and behavior (TACT), two other measurement issues have been shown to affect the ability to predict behaviors from attitudes

1. the amount of time that elapses between the attitude and the behavioral measurement - the more time that elapses between the two measurements, the lower the correlation 2. the extent to which the subjects' attention is focused on their "inner states" when either the attitude or the behavior measure is taken - in other words, when subjects' thoughts are focused on their true internal feelings, they are more likely to act in a manner consistent with those feelings

3 aspects of persuasion

1. the source 2. the audience 3. the message content

attitude

a general and enduring positive or negative feeling about some person, object, or issue

intervening variable

a variable that comes between the hypothesized cause (eg: IV) and the effect (eg: DV) in a causal relationship, often affects the strength of the relationship between them

independent variable (IV)

a variable that is hypothesized by the researcher to cause changes in some other variable

all behaviors have both a(n) _____________ and _____________ component

action; target - the action component represents the behavior being performed - the target component represents the object toward which the action is directed - eg: the behavior of "going to church" has both target (the church) and action (attendance) components - to predict a particular behavior maximally well, A and F argued that the measures of the attitudes must contain exactly the same action and target components as those represented in the behavior - a strong attitude-behavior relationship should be expected only when there is a high degree of correspondence between the attitude measure and the behavior - eg: measuring attitudes toward charitable orgs. and using those measured attitudes to predict contributions to the Red Cross would constitute a low degree of attitude-behavior correspondence because it contains neither the action component (donating money) nor the target (Red Cross) of the behavior - many prior studies lacked correspondence because they measured general attitudes and used these to predict behaviors toward specific people or situations

factorial experimental design

after single-factor experimental design, researchers soon became interested in estimating the separate and combined effects of 2+ IVs on a DV - factorial designs were developed to accomplish this - eg: if someone wanted to determine if fear appeals are more persuasive when they come from highly credible sources, a factorial design that manipulates both the amount of fear-arousing info and the credibility of the source would be useful - enable researchers to identify both separate and combined impacts of the IVs on the DVs - the separate effects of the IV are called main effects - the combined impact of 2+ IVs is called interaction effects - a design is said to be "completely crossed" when a separate condition is created for every possible combination of all the levels of all the IVs

persuasive communication

any message that is intended to shape, reinforce, or change the responses of another, or others

moderator variable

any variable that affects the nature (direction or strength) of the relationship between an IV and DV but does not necessarily come between them

Over more than 80 years, _____________ have remained a central component of many persuasive communication theories

attitudes

social science theories attempt to...

describe, explain, and predict human behavior

moderators related to attitude formation

direct experience and vested interest

random assignment

every research participant has an equal chance of being placed in each of the experimental conditions - in many studies, random assignment is not possible - instead, participants are assigned to treatment conditions on the basis of membership in some preexisting group (eg on pg 40-41)

information error test

giving people what appears to be an objective multiple-choice test, but the test is unique in that none of the answers are correct - this technique assumes that, over a series of items, the person's own attitude toward whatever the researchers are studying will consistently influence the direction of the bias

we develop and maintain __________ __________ because they help us to describe, explain, and predict what will happen in many persuasive exchanges

implicit theories eg: if a child wants to ask their parent for something but knows that the parent is in a bad mood, they will likely ask them for whatever they want when the parent is in a better mood

communication

intentional transmission of ideas from one individual to one or more others

scholars hypothesized that there were a number of _____________ ______________ that influenced the strength of the attitude-behavior relationship

moderator variables

__________ __________ ____________ provides a clearer understanding of the relationship between attitude and behaviors

reasoned action theories

The theories of Reasoned Action and Planned Behavior have been integrated into a combined model that argues that people often have behavioral intentions but are unable to act on those intentions because they lack...

required skills or are restrained by environmental factors

prescriptive beliefs

subjective statements about the appropriateness of a position or activity in a given situation; reflect the values, morals, or ethics of the person eg: SNL promotes immoral behavior

evaluative beliefs

subjective statements that reflect a general evaluation of an attitude object eg: SNL is entertaining

indirect attitude measure

subjects are unaware that attitudes are being measured, thus minimizing their concerns about giving an "appropriate" or "desirable" response

One's attitude serves as a convenient ____________ of a wide variety of beliefs

summary

a variable is anything that can...

take on more than one level eg: sex, race, source credibility, argument quality

single factor experimental design

the most basic experimental design involves the control (manipulation) of a single IV and the assessment of its influence on a DV - egs on pgs. 41-43

descriptive beliefs

verifiable and objective statements about people, objects, or situations eg: SNL is a comedy TV show