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
