Theories of Attitudes

What are the different features of each of the Latitudes?

- acceptance, rejection, and non-committance - strong attitude(ego-involvement)- acceptance and non-committance get smaller and rejection gets bigger -weak attitude- non-committance gets larger

What is an example of selective perception?

- If a pro-life advocate reads an op ed on why abortion should be legal, they might actively try to find flaws in the article to further validate their own position. -Or if an ultra-conservative christian hears about the AIDS epidemic among homosexuals, they may see the disease as a punishment for what they believe to be morally wrong

How are relationships important to persuasion?

-You are likely to believe what those closest to you believe -There are many ways you can compensate for imbalance to save your relationship

How can contrast cause a boomerang effect?

-boomerang effect is the result of contrast -when you perceive the persuasive message as further away from your anchor -fails in the opposite direction, you are more against it than you were before

What are the three components that make up SJT

1.) reference point/anchor: current attitude 2.) Persuasive messages 3.) Distortion -people's prior attitudes (anchors) produce systematic distortions in the way people perceive persuasive communications

How is classical conditioning used to create attitudes?

Associating an object with another stimulus that is rewarding/punishing Helps shape/reinforce the attitude

What are ways to restore balance besides changing attitude (Bolstering, Denial, Differentiation)?

Denial: you won't believe the other person doesn't like something.. it never happened ex. you just forget about it Bolstering: Agree to disagree but we agree about SO many other things that it outweighs the one thing we don't agree about Differentiation: You like people for certain reasons and you differentiate compartments of their lives that you disagree with ex. you overlook a politician's scandal, focus on his good policy

What is Accessibility?

Describes the ease at which an attitude or association is readily available

What are implicit attitudes?

Evaluations that have an unknown origin, are activated automatically, and influence implicit, mostly uncontrollable, responses Automatic response to an attitude object

How can implicit attitudes affect behavior?

Implicit attitude are habitual Will influence nonverbal behavior and other responses are lack of total control

What are Triads?

P = perceiver (person you are concerned about) X = attitudinal entity O = other --> friend or enemy

Social Judgement Theory

People don't just evaluate message based on the argument, they compare the message position to their own attitude and then decide if they should accept the message

How does Social Judgment Theory relate to persuasion?

Persuasion requires a match between the message and the individual's existing attitude, persuaders cannot veer too far from the individual's pre existing position if they hope to nudge the individual to change his or her attitude on the issue

What is the Assimilation/Contrast effect?

Result of discrepancy 1.) Assimilation- people pull a somewhat congenial message toward their own attitude, assuming that the message is more similar to their attitude than it really is 2.) Contrast- individuals push a somewhat disagreeable message away from their attitude, assuming that it is more different than it really is

What does Ego-Involvement seek to explain?

Selective perception: when people perceive events so that they fit their preconceived beliefs and attitudes

What is Balance Theory?

Theory that says attitudes are often created in social triads - what our friends/enemies think is important you -imbalance causes tension --> we must revert to a balanced state -agreement with friends and disagreement with enemies is balanced but the other way around is not balanced

Why are more accessible attitudes harder to change?

They have often been ingrained into our long-term memory and have been linked to other associated pathways

How do people generally approach information that is inconsistent with their attitude?

They typically disregard it as wrong or not credible

What does it mean to have dual attitudes?

an explicit attitude that operates on a conscious level and guides most everyday behavior, and an implicit attitude that influences nonverbal behaviors

How does association help make attitudes more accessible?

creates association between stimuli, increases accessibility because it requires less effort, increased entry into the brain

What is spreading activation?

creation of inroads into the brain, when a stimuli has more associations

How does accessibility help us make decisions more easily?

decreases the amount of time needed to pull information from brain decreases amount of effort working memory has to do to form new association or think about an issue

How does Ego-Involvement change latitudes?

definition: arousal of the individuals commitments or stances in the context of appropriate situations - high ego-involvement: Larger latitude of rejection, small latitude of non commitment - low-involvement: smaller latitude of rejection and larger non-commitment

What is response time?

how fast or slow a person reacts to a stimuli how fast or slow connections or readily available an attitude is

How is this related to the capital punishment study?

participants in the study processed the information very selectively (exhibiting biased assimilation) Ego-involved participants Proponents of capital punishments found the pro-death-penalty study more convincing and opponents found the anti-death-penalty study more persuasive

What is selective perception?

perceiving events so that they fit a person's preconceived beliefs and attitude

What is priming?

similar concepts become associated due to spreading activation typically seen with branding: think Marlboro Red and McDonalds Arch. you've associated it with mcdonalds so many times that when you only see the arch, you still associate it with McDonalds

What is Ego-Involvement?

the arousal, singly or in combination, of the individual's commitments or stance in the context of appropriate situations; people are ego-involved when they perceive that the issue touches on their self-concepts or core values -low Non-committance area for highly ego-involved people -bigger for a low ego-involed person

What is selective exposure?

the tendency to seek out communications that embrace one's worldview

What is biased assimilation of ambiguous information?

when people who disagree ar given balanced info on a topic, only the information supporting a view is assimilated -any unsupported info is often put in the latitude of rejection -hard to change people's beliefs