3. 3
Attitudes: evaluations of various aspects of the social world
• The study of attitudes is a major topic within the field of social
psychology
• They represent a very basic component of social cognition
• They often influence behavior, especially when they are strong,
accessible, and longstanding
Attitudes
4. 4
Evaluations of people, objects, and ideas.
Attitudes
• People are not neutral observers of the world.
• They evaluate what they encounter.
• They form attitudes.
THE NATURE AND ORIGIN OF ATTITUDES
5. 5
Attitudes are made up of three parts that
together form our evaluation of the “attitude
object”:
1. An affective component, consisting of your
emotional reactions toward the attitude object.
2. A cognitive component, consisting of your
thoughts and beliefs about the attitude object.
3. A behavioral component, consisting of your
actions or observable behavior toward the
attitude object.
THE NATURE AND ORIGIN OF ATTITUDES
6. 6
1. What is your affective reaction when you see a certain car?
-- Perhaps you have feelings of excitement.
– If you are a U.S. autoworker examining a new foreign-made
model, maybe you feel anger and resentment.
2. What is your cognitive reaction?
-- What beliefs do you hold about the car’s attributes?
– Perhaps you admire the hybrid engine that makes it one of the
most fuel efficient cars you can buy.
3. What is your behavioral reaction?
– Do you go to a dealership and test-drive the car and actually
buy one? –
THE NATURE AND ORIGIN OF ATTITUDES
7. 7
• Even if there is a genetic component, our social experiences clearly play a
large role in shaping our attitudes.
• Not all attitudes are created equally.
• Though all attitudes have affective, cognitive, and behavioral components, any
given attitude can be based more on one type of experience than another.
Where Do Attitudes Come From?
8. 8
One provocative answer is that some attitudes, at least, are
linked to our genes.
• Identical twins share more attitudes than fraternal twins,
even when raised in different homes, never knowing each
other.
• Some attitudes are an indirect function of our genetic
makeup, related to things like our temperament and
personality.
Where Do Attitudes Come From?
9. 9
An attitude is based primarily on people’s beliefs about the
properties of an attitude object.
Cognitively Based Attitude
Sometimes our attitudes are based primarily on relevant facts,
such as the objective merits of an automobile.
• How many miles to the gallon does it get?
• Does it have side-impact airbags?
10. 10
An attitude is based more on people’s feelings and values
than on their beliefs about the nature of an attitude object.
Affectively Based Attitude
• Sometimes we simply like a car, regardless of how many miles to
the gallon it gets.
• Occasionally we even feel great about something or someone in
spite of having negative beliefs.
11. 11
If affectively based attitudes do not come from examining
the facts, where do they come from?
They can result from:
1. People’s values, such as religious and moral beliefs,
2. Sensory reactions, such as liking the taste of chocolate
3. Aesthetic reaction, such as admiring a painting or the
lines and color of a car,
4. Conditioning.
12. 12
The phenomenon whereby a
stimulus that elicits an
emotional response is
repeatedly paired with a
neutral stimulus that does not
until the neutral stimulus takes
on the emotional properties of
the first stimulus.
Classical Conditioning
Classical conditioning works this way:
A stimulus that elicits an emotional response is
accompanied by a neutral stimulus that does not
until eventually, the neutral stimulus elicits the
emotional response by itself.
• Suppose that when you were a child, you
experienced feelings of warmth and love when you
visited your grandmother.
• Suppose also that her house always smelled faintly
of mothballs.
• Eventually, the smell of mothballs alone will trigger
the emotions you experienced during your visits,
through the process of classical conditioning.
13. 13
The phenomenon
whereby behaviors that
people freely choose to
perform increase or
decrease in frequency,
depending on whether
they are followed by
positive reinforcement
or punishment.
Operant Conditioning
14. 14
How does this apply to attitudes? Imagine:
• A 4-year-old white girl goes to the playground and begins to play with an African
American girl.
• Her father expresses strong disapproval, telling her, “We don’t play with that kind of
child.”
• It won’t take long before the child associates interacting with African Americans with
disapproval, thereby adopting her father’s racist attitudes.
In operant conditioning, behaviors we freely perform become more
or less frequent, depending on whether they are followed by a
reward (positive reinforcement) or punishment.
16. 16
Although affectively based attitudes come from many
sources, we can group them into one family because
they:
(1)Do not result from a rational examination of the issues,
(2)Are not governed by logic (e.g., persuasive arguments about the
issues seldom change an affectively based attitude), and
(3)Are often linked to people’s values, so trying to change them
challenges those values.
17. 17
• According to Daryl Bem’s (1972)self-perceptionn theory, under certain
circumstances, people don’t know how they feel until they see how
they behave.
• We can form our attitudes based on our observations of our own
behavior.
Behaviorally Based Attitude
An attitude based on observations of how one
behaves toward an attitude object.
18. 18
People infer their attitudes from their
behavior only under certain conditions.
1. Their initial attitude has to be weak
or ambiguous.
2. 2. People infer their attitudes from
their behavior only when there are
no other plausible explanations for
their behavior.
20. 20
Explicit Attitudes Attitudes that we
consciously endorse and can easily
report.
Consider Sam, a white, middle-class college
student who genuinely believes that all races
are equal and abhors any kind of racial bias.
This is Sam’s explicit attitude, in the sense that it
is his conscious evaluation of members of other
races that governs how he chooses to act.
For instance, consistent with his explicit
attitude, Sam recently signed a petition in favor
of affirmative action policies at his university.
Explicit versus Implicit Attitudes
Implicit Attitudes Attitudes that are
involuntary, uncontrollable, and at
times unconscious
21. 21
Sam has grown up in a culture in which there are many negative stereotypes about
minority groups, however, and it is possible that some of these negative ideas have
seeped into him in ways of which he is not fully aware.
When Sam is around African Americans, for example, perhaps some negative
feelings are triggered automatically and unintentionally. If so, he has a negative
implicit attitude toward African Americans.
People can have explicit and implicit attitudes toward virtually anything, not just
other races.
For example, students can believe explicitly that they hate math but have a more
positive attitude at an implicit level.
Explicit versus Implicit Attitudes
22. 22
• When attitudes change, they often do so in response to social
influence.
• Our attitudes toward everything from a presidential candidate to a
brand of laundry detergent can be influenced by what other people do
or say.
• This is why attitudes are of such interest to social psychologists—even
something as personal and internal as an attitude is a highly social
phenomenon, influenced by the imagined or actual behavior of other
people.
HOW DO ATTITUDES CHANGE?
24. 24
As we noted in Chapter 6, people experience dissonance:
• When they do something that threatens their image of themselves as
decent, kind, and honest. • Particularly if there is no way they can explain
away this behavior due to external circumstances.
When you can’t find external justification for your behavior, you will
attempt to find internal justification by bringing the two cognitions (your
attitude and your behavior) closer together.
Changing Attitudes by Changing Behavior: Cognitive
Dissonance Theory Revisited
25. 25
Changing Attitudes by Changing Behavior: Cognitive
Dissonance Theory Revisited
Suppose you don’t want to rub your new father-in-law the wrong
way by arguing with him about politics. You might go along with
a mildly positive remark about a politician you actually dislike.
Counter attitudinal advocacy, a process by which people are
influenced to state publicly an opinion attitude that runs counter
to their own private attitudes, creates dissonance.
When that is accomplished with a minimum of external
justification, it results in a change in people’s private attitude
toward the direction of public statements.
26. 26
Persuasive Communication
Communication (e.g., a speech or television ad) advocating a
particular side of an issue.
How should you construct a message so that
it would really change people’s attitudes?
27. 27
Yale Attitude Change
Approach
The study of the conditions
under which people are most
likely to change their attitudes
in response to persuasive
messages, focusing on “who
said what to whom”—the
source of the communication,
the nature of the
communication, and the
nature of the audience.
Persuasive Communications and Attitude Change
28. 28
The Central and Peripheral Routes to Persuasion
Elaboration Likelihood Model An explanation of the two ways
in which persuasive communications can cause attitude
change:
• Centrally, when people are motivated and have the ability
to pay attention to the arguments in the communication.
• peripherally, when people do not pay attention to the
arguments but are instead swayed by surface characteristics.
29. 29
Under certain conditions, people are motivated to pay attention to
the facts in a communication, and so they will be most persuaded
when these facts are logically compelling.
Central Route to Persuasion
The case whereby people elaborate on a persuasive
communication, listening carefully to and thinking about the
arguments, as occurs when people have both the ability and
the motivation to listen carefully to a communication.
The Central and Peripheral Routes to Persuasion
30. The Central and Peripheral Routes to
Persuasion
â–· Under other conditions, people are not motivated to pay
attention to the facts; instead, they notice only the surface
characteristics of the message such as how long it is and who is
delivering it.
30
Peripheral Route to Persuasion
The case whereby people do not elaborate on the
arguments in a persuasive communication but are instead
swayed by peripheral cues.
32. 32
One thing that determines whether people are motivated to pay
attention to communication is the personal relevance of the topic:
• How important is the topic to a person’s well-being?
The more personally relevant an issue is, the more willing people are to
pay attention to the arguments in a speech, and therefore the more likely
people are to take the central route to persuasion.
The Motivation to Pay Attention to the Arguments
34. 34
People high in the need for cognition are more likely to form their attitudes by paying
close attention to relevant arguments (i.e., via the central route), whereas people low in
the need for cognition are more likely to rely on peripheral cues, such as how attractive
or credible a speaker is.
The Motivation to Pay Attention to the Arguments
Need for Cognition A personality variable reflecting the extent to which
people engage in and enjoy effortful cognitive activities.
When people are unable to pay close attention to the arguments, they are swayed more
by peripheral cues.
• Status of communicator
• Liking or trusting communicator
Therefore someone with a weak argument can create distractions (e.g., loud music) to
make people more susceptible to peripheral influence.
35. 35
How to Achieve Long-Lasting Attitude Change
Compared to people who base their attitudes on
peripheral cues, people who base their attitudes on a
careful analysis of the arguments will be:
• More likely to maintain this attitude over time,
• More likely to behave consistently with this attitude,
• More resistant to counter-persuasion.
36. 36
• Before people will consider your carefully constructed
arguments, you have to get their attention.
• One way is to grab people’s attention by playing with
their emotions.
Emotion and Attitude Change
37. 37
Fear-Arousing Communications Do fear-arousing communications
work?
• If a moderate amount of fear is created and people believe that
listening to the message will teach them how to reduce this fear, they
will be motivated to analyze the message carefully and will likely
change their attitudes via the central route. Source of image:
Microsoft Office Online.
Fear-Arousing Communications
Persuasive messages that attempt to change people’s
attitudes by arousing their fears.
38. 38
A group of smokers who watched a graphic film depicting lung cancer and then
read pamphlets with specific instructions about how to quit smoking reduced
their smoking significantly more than people who were shown only the film or
only the pamphlet.
39. 39
• Fear-arousing appeals will also fail if
they are so strong that they
overwhelm people.
• If people are scared to death, they will
become defensive, deny the
importance of the threat, and be
unable to think rationally about the
issue.
Fear-Arousing Communications
40. 40
Heuristic–Systematic Model of Persuasion
An explanation of the two ways in which persuasive communications can
cause attitude change: either systematically processing the merits of the
arguments or using mental shortcuts (heuristics) – (e.g., thinking, “Experts are
always right”)
Interestingly, our emotions and moods can themselves act as heuristics to
determine our attitudes. When trying to decide attitude about something, we
often rely on the “How do I feel about it?”-heuristic.
If we feel good, we must have a positive attitude; if we feel bad, it’s thumbs
down.
Emotions as a Heuristic
41. 41
• The problem with the “How do I feel about it?”
heuristic is that we can make mistakes about what is
causing our mood, misattributing feelings created by
one source to another.
• If so, people might make a bad decision.
• Once you get a new couch home, you might discover
that it no longer makes you feel all that great.
• Advertisers and retailers want to create good feelings
while they present their product (e.g., by playing
appealing music or showing pleasant images), hoping
that people will attribute at least some of those feelings
to the product they are trying to sell.
Emotions as a Heuristic
42. 42
Several studies have shown that it is best to fight fire with fire:
• If an attitude is cognitively based, try to change it with rational arguments.
• If it is affectively based, try to change it with emotional appeals.
• Some ads stress the objective merits of a product, such as an ad for an air
conditioner or a vacuum cleaner that discusses its price, efficiency, and reliability.
• Other ads stress emotions and values, such as ones for perfume or designer jeans
that try to associate their brands with sex, beauty, and youthfulness, rather than
saying anything about the objective qualities of the product.
• Which kind of ad is most effective?
Emotion and Different Types of Attitudes
44. 44
• Perhaps people in Western cultures base their attitudes more on
concerns about individuality and self-improvement, whereas
people in Asian cultures base their attitudes more on concerns
about their standing in their social group, such as their families.
• If so, advertisements that stress individuality and self-
improvement might work better in Western cultures, and
advertisements that stress one’s social group might work better in
Asian cultures.
Culture and Different Types of Attitudes
45. 45
Being Alert to Product Placement
• When an advertisement comes on during a TV show, people often decide to press
the mute button on the remote control or to get up and get a snack.
• To counteract this tendency to tune out, advertisers look for ways of displaying
their wares during the show itself.
• With this technique, called product placement, companies pay the makers of a TV
show or movie to incorporate their product into the script.
Attitude Inoculation Making people immune to attempts to change their
attitudes by initially exposing them to small doses of the arguments against their
position.
RESISTING PERSUASIVE MESSAGES
46. 46
Being Alert to Product Placement
• When an advertisement comes on during a TV show, people often decide to press the mute
button on the remote control or to get up and get a snack.
• To counteract this tendency to tune out, advertisers look for ways of displaying their wares
during the show itself. • With this technique, called product placement, companies pay the
makers of a TV show or movie to incorporate their product into the script.
• When people are forewarned, they analyse what they see and hear more carefully and as a
result are likely to avoid attitude change.
• Without such warnings, people pay little attention to persuasive attempts and tend to accept
them at face value.
• So before kids watch TV or send them off to the movies, it is good to remind them that they
are likely to encounter several attempts to change their attitudes.
RESISTING PERSUASIVE MESSAGES
47. 47
Resisting Peer Pressure
• Peer pressure is linked to values and emotions, playing on their fear of rejection and their desire
for freedom and autonomy.
• In adolescence, peers become an important source of social approval—perhaps the most
important—and can dispense powerful rewards for holding certain attitudes or behaving in certain
ways, such as using drugs or engaging in unprotected sex.
• What is needed is a technique that will make young people more resistant to attitude change
attempts via peer pressure so that they will be less likely to engage in dangerous behaviors.
• One possibility is to extend the logic of the attitude inoculation approach to more affectively
based persuasion techniques, such as peer pressure.
• In addition to inoculating people with doses of logical arguments that they might hear, we could
also inoculate them with samples of the kinds of emotional appeals they might encounter. Source
of image: Microsoft Office Online.
RESISTING PERSUASIVE MESSAGES
48. 48
WHEN WILL ATTITUDES PREDICT BEHAVIOR?
The relationship between attitudes and behavior is not simple, as shown in a classic study (LaPiere,
1934):
• In the early 1930s, Richard LaPiere embarked on a cross-country sightseeing trip with a young Chinese
couple. • Prejudice against Asians was common in the United States at this time, so at each hotel,
campground, and restaurant they entered, LaPiere worried that his friends would be refused service.
• To his surprise, of the 251 establishments he and his friends visited, only one refused to serve them.
• And yet when surveyed, only one replied that it would serve a Chinese visitor. More than 90 percent
said they definitely would not; the rest were undecided.
When Persuasion Attempts Boomerang:
Reactance Theory Reactance Theory
The idea that when people feel their freedom to perform a certain behavior is threatened, an
unpleasant state of reactance is aroused, which they can reduce by performing the threatening
behaviour.
49. 49
Predicting Deliberative Behaviors
Predicting Spontaneous Behaviors
Attitudes will predict spontaneous behaviors only when they are highly accessible to people.
Attitude Accessibility The strength of the association between an attitude object and a
person’s evaluation of that object, is measured by the speed with which people can
report how they feel about the object.
Theory of Planned Behavior
The idea that the best predictors of a person’s planned, deliberate behaviors are the person’s
attitudes toward specific behaviors, subjective norms, and perceived behavioral control.
50. 50
Specific behaviors: The theory of planned behavior holds that only
specific attitudes toward the behavior in question can be expected to
predict that behavior.
Subjective norms: We also need to measure people’s subjective
norms—their beliefs about how people they care about will view the
behavior in question.
Perceived behavioral control: Intentions are influenced by the ease
with which they believe they can perform the behavior.
Predicting Deliberative Behaviors
52. 52
It turns out that people are influenced by advertisements more than they think. The
results of over three hundred split cable market tests indicate that advertising does
work, particularly for new products. Effective ads worked quickly, increasing sales
substantially within the first six months they were shown.
THE POWER OF ADVERTISING
Subliminal Messages Words or pictures that are not consciously
perceived but may nevertheless influence people’s judgments,
attitudes, and behaviors.
Simply stated, there is no evidence that the types of subliminal messages encountered in
everyday life have any influence on people’s behavior.
53. 53
• Advertisements transmit cultural stereotypes in their words and images, subtly
linking products with desired images.
• Advertisements can also reinforce and perpetuate stereotypical ways of thinking
about social groups.
Advertising, Cultural Stereotypes, and Social Behavior
Stereotype Threat The apprehension experienced by members
of a group that their behavior might confirm a cultural
stereotype.
54. Advertising, Cultural Stereotypes, and Social
Behavior
54
• Gender stereotypes are particularly pervasive in advertising imagery.
• Men are depicted as doers, women as observers.
