Social Psychology Attitudes

Attitude extremity

How strong is the emotional reaction? • Determined by vested interest (how relevant are its consequences?)

Affect misattribution procedure (AMP)

Participants primes with picture (e.g., a face) - often subliminal (presented too fast for awareness)

Attitude

Your evaluation of something

Resistance to change is highest when

clarity and correctness are high

Dissonance is stronger when we have

few reasons for engaging in attitude discrepant behavior

Why bother with with implicit attitudes?

Can examine attitudes that are other biased by social desirability in self-report measures

Cognitive dissonance

Discomfort when we realize our attitudes and behaviors don't line up

Peripheral route (heuristic processing)

Most likely to be used by people who have: • Are unmotivated or lack capacity to process information

Central route (systematic processing)

Most likely to be used by people who have: • Have motivation and capacity to process information

Generating feelings of hypocrisy

Point out the inconsistencies between their beliefs and their behavior • Must publicly advocate for an attitude • Give direct behavioral change

Pluralistic ignorance

We believe others have different attitudes than we do, even when they don't

Theory of planned behavior Part 2

• Decides whether to act and develops intentions • Sometimes we make a plan for implementing

Attitude-to-behavior process model

• A stimulus activates our attitude automatically • Knowledge of what's appropriate (norms) is also activated

Social learning: Observation learning

• Acquire attitudes/behaviors by observing other people (observational learning) º Social comparison º Reference groups

3 dimensions of an attitude

• Affect (feelings) • Behavior • Cognition (thoughts)

Attitude-to-behavior process model Part 2

• Attitude & norms shape interpretation of event • Interpretation influences behavior

Explicit attitude

• Attitude you are aware of • Controllable • Self-reported • "Slow" thinking: deliberative

Implicit attitudes

• Attitudes you may not be aware of, or are more subtle • Difficult to control • "Fast" thinking - intuitive

Elaboration likelihood model (two major routes to persuasion)

• Central • Peripheral

Direct methods focus on the attitude-behavior discrepancy directly

• Change your attitude to match your behavior • Can alter our behavior to match our attitude • Trivialization - inconsistency doesn't matter

Attitude certainty

• Clarity: knowing what one's attitude is º Predicts private behavior • Correctness: feeling one's attitude is valid or right º Correctness predicts public behavior

How are attitudes formed?

• Conditioning: learning by association • Social learning: learning by interaction with/observation of others

Conditioning: Classical conditioning

• Direct route: general positive stimuli paired with target; directly transfers affect • Indirection route: create "memory link" by pairing target with a specific stimulus

Persuasion

• Efforts to change attitudes • Effectiveness depends on: º Communication º Message º Audience

Peripheral

• Heuristic • Mental shortcuts to judge message • Less effort, automatic

Measuring implicit attitudes

• Implicit association test (IAT) • Affect misattribution procedure (AMP)

Attitudes based on direct experience have stronger effects than attitudes formed indirectly

• More accessible • Greater elaboration • Resistance to change • Especially powerful when consistent with our attitudes

How does vested interest influence behavior?

• More salient ("accessible") guide for behavior • Elaborate on arguments favoring their position • Relevant to immediate context

Implicit association test (IAT)

• Most common measure of implicit attitudes • Categorization of words and faces • Faster response times = stronger association • Slower response times = weaker association

Theory of planned behavior

• Rationally forming a decision to engage in a behavior • Consider multiple behavioral options and their outcome

Resisting persuasion

• Reactance - negative reactions to others telling us what to do • Forewarning - resist persuasion when we know we're going to be targeted

Typical features of effective communicators

• Seems credible º Expertise º In-group member • Argue against self-interests • Physically attractive

Resisting persuasion Part 2

• Selective avoidance - giving attention to attitude-confirming information and ignoring attitude-disconfirming • Counterarguments - come up with arguments to undermine attitude different from our own

Indirect methods reduce the negative affect associated with dissonance

• Self-affirmation

Effective messages are

• Spread by word of mouth • Subtle • Not based in fear

Conditioning: Instrumental (operant) conditioning

• Strengthens responses with positive outcomes and weakens responses with negative outcomes • Based on reward and punishment

Central

• Systematic processing • Carefully consider messahe content • Effortful, deliberate