Attitudes

1. Attitudes Chapter 3

2. Attitudes Is Isn’t But, used to be Not anymore Wish they were…

3. Attitudes • Of course, I’m talking about being “COOL” • Cool is a highly prized virtue • It has replaced goodness, quality, and servitude as the modern, secular virtue • Cool is… • An attitude of defiance to authority and tradition • A “permanent state of private rebellion” • An unashamed amalgam of “narcissism, ironic detachment, and hedonism” • Cool is not just a contemporary concept • Is has a long and distinguished heritage over many centuries and continents • Of course if hasn’t always been called “cool” • But, the attitude of cool can be identified in many places and in many time periods

5. What is an Attitude? • When we talk about attitudes we talk about them as something people “have” • “She has an attitude.” or “He has an attitude problem!” • We talk as though people can have an attitude in the same way they have an ear, a toe, or a new car • We give “attitude” the status of a noun, like it is something real and tangible, and that influences the behavior of the “attitude-owner” • We don’t really stop to think about what we mean when we talk about attitudes

6. What is an Attitude? • But, it hasn’t always been that way • The concept of attitude can be traced back to 1710 when it was first introduced to the English language • It was used by sociologist Herbert Spencer and biologist Charles Darwin in the mid to late 1800s • Used in the early 19th century to refer to a physiological state or physical orientation • So, “attitude” has not always been a part of the common sense we take it to be now

7. What is an Attitude? • To date, attitudes have been the single most researched topic in social psychology • But, the definitions, models, and theories of attitudes used by social psychologists are more often than not vague and inconsistent • So it is useful for us to be clear about what social psychologists typically mean by “attitude” • “… attitudes are defined at least implicitly as responses that locate ‘objects of thought’ on ‘dimensions of judgment’.” • And… • “…[an attitude is] a general and enduring positive or negative feeling about some person, object or issue.”

8. What is an Attitude? • Thus, attitudes are first and foremost evaluations • They convey what we think and how we feel about some object, or attitude referent • All attitudes have a referent, an “object of thought,” a “stimulus object” • Referents may be specific and tangible like… • But, referents may also be abstract or intangible like liberalism, equality and “awesomeness”

9. What is an Attitude? • By indicating the attitude-holder’s “orientation” to the referent, an attitude conveys that person’s evaluation of the referent • Attitudes are expressed in the language of “like/dislike,” “approach/avoid,” and “good/bad” • i.e. they are evaluative • Thus, when the object of the attitude is important to the person, the evaluation of the object produces an affective, or emotional, reaction in that person

10. What is an Attitude? • Important features of attitudes • First, attitudes have specific referents, and thus will only be relevant when a particular object, person or issue is categorized as being attitude-relevant • This implies that activation of an attitude requires at least some minimal cognitive effort • However, this effort is so minimal that attitudes can be activated and can function automatically • It has been argued that an attitude is represented in memory by • An object label and rules for applying that label • An evaluative summary of that object • A knowledge structure supporting that evaluation

11. What is an Attitude? • Second, attitudes are relatively enduring • Although attitudes can change, as a result of new experience or following some persuasive communication, an attitude is not usually considered to be a transitory evaluation • Rather, it is considered an expression of a largely stable body of knowledge and experience with a particular object, person or issue

12. What is an Attitude? • The dimensions of judgment upon which attitudes fall may be universal or specific, socially shared or unique to a single individual • Ex. All referents: George W. Bush, brussels sprouts, Jack Daniels, liberalism, equality, and “awesomeness” can be placed somewhere on a dimension ranging from bad to good, or like to dislike • But, not all referents can be located on a dimension from stupid to smart, or “cool” to “lame”

13. Social Cognition and Attitudes: “ABC Models” • The definition of attitude as evaluation is becoming increasingly common, but still not universal • It is replacing a previously widespread 3-part explanation of attitudes: the ABC model • Divides attitudes into 3 components: affect, behavior, and cognition • For this model, attitudes are predispositions to respond to some class of stimuli with certain classes of responses • The 3 major classes of response are cognitive, affective, and behavioral

14. Social Cognition and Attitudes: “ABC Models” • Cognitive responses are the knowledge and beliefs a person has about a particular stimulus object • Affective responses are simply how the person feels about a stimulus object • Behavioral responses are simply overt behaviors

15. Social Cognition and Attitudes: “ABC Models” • The model allows for these 3 responses to be inconsistent with one another • Which is helpful because more often than not they are • But, the degree of discrepancy between the 3 presumed components of the same attitude held by one person towards a single object is usually so large that the tri-component model has largely been dismissed • Ex. Sally does not like olives (cognitive and affective), based on this, one would expect Sally not to eat olives (behavior) • But, Sally is dating Tommy and really wants his mother to like her (cognitive) • Sally goes to Tommy’s mother’s house for dinner and eats a dish filled with olives (behavior) rather than tell Tommy’s mother she doesn’t like the food • Also, by defining behavior as just a component of attitude, any supposed relationship between attitude and behavior is simply defined away • This is not a helpful resolution of one of social psychology’s major problems: • Do attitudes predict behavior?

16. Social Cognition and Attitudes: How are Attitudes Organized? • Attitudes are conceptualized as having a definite structure with 2 parts • Intra-attitudinal structure • The structure that derives from the relationships between the affective and cognitive (and perhaps behavioral) components of a particular attitude • Inter-attitudinal structure • The structure that exists across attitudes and that organizes the associations between attitudes to a range of different attitude objects • Additionally, the concept of attitudes as knowledge structures (or schemas) gives rise to important properties of attitudes, including their accessibility and potential for automatic activation

17. Social Cognition and Attitudes: Properties of Attitudes from Structure • In many ways an attitudes is like a schema • Except that attitudes have the evaluation of that referent as their defining and central element • 3 aspects of attitudes deriving from their structure as schemas are particularly important: • Accessibility, activation, and the possibility of ambivalent attitudes

18. Social Cognition and Attitudes: Accessibility of Attitudes • Some attitudes come to mind more easily than others • Social psychology distinguishes between the availability of an attitude and its accessibility • An attitude is available if it exists within a person’s cognitive structure • That is, if the person actually possesses that attitude • Attitude accessibility is the ease with which a particular attitude can be retrieved from memory • Usually operationalized as the speed with which the attitude can be assessed • The accessibility of an attitude at any given time is affected by: • The structural properties of the attitude (attitude strength) • And aspects of the context that serve to “prime” particular attitudes as being relevant to that context • Accessibility is an important property of attitudes because accessible attitudes govern behavior more strongly than do less accessible attitudes

19. Social Cognition and Attitudes: Accessibility of Attitudes • Most of the enduring differences between people in the accessibility of particular attitudes are considered to be due to the strength of their attitudes • An attitude is said to be strong if there is a consistent, well-rehearsed link between an attitude object and its evaluation • Ex. If someone thinks about George W. Bush regularly, and each time evaluates him in a moderately negative way, that person will be said to develop a strong attitude towards George W. Bush • The strength of an attitude does not refer to its extremity (i.e. the degree of positivity or negativity in the evaluation) • Rather, it refers to the frequency and consistency of its expression • The association between an object and its evaluation becomes well developed through repetition making an attitude strong • Thus, strong attitudes are more accessible (more easily and quickly activated) than weaker attitudes, and are therefore more influential on behavior

20. Social Cognition and Attitudes: Accessibility of Attitudes • Not all our attitudes are active at any one time • It almost goes without saying that only a small set of our stock pile of attitudes is active at any given moment • Attitudes must be activated, or “turned on” somehow • The process of attitude activation has received considerable research attention and much of this work has drawn from principles of cognitive psychology • Attitudes are conceived as nodes in memory, connected in an associative network • Nodes are activated when we categorize some experience in terms of them, and multiple nodes become connected through experience of co-activation • Ex. “kitten” and “cute” or “reality television” and “crazy” • The more frequently any connection is experience the stronger that connection becomes

21. Reality TV Crazy

22. Social Cognition and Attitudes: Accessibility of Attitudes • It has been argued, based on the associative network of attitudes, that an attitude is an association between a referent (object, person, issue) and its subjective evaluation • Thus, noticing an object in the environment and categorizing it as an instance of a particular type of object activates the node corresponding to that type of object in memory • After this initial activation, activation will “spread” from the object node to the evaluation node associated with it, in proportion to the strength of the association • When the association between the object and its evaluation is strong enough, simply noticing the object will cause the evaluation to become activated

23. Reality TV Identified as a reality show Crazy

24. Social Cognition and Attitudes: Automatic and Implicit Attitudes • Some connections become so well rehearsed that when one node is activated, the other is automatically activated • Automatic activation is said to occur if merely thinking about or noticing the attitude object produces the evaluation of that object even if evaluation of the object is not intended at that time

25. Crazy

26. Social Cognition and Attitudes: Automatic and Implicit Attitudes • Several studies have found evidence for automatic activation of attitudes • Positive or negative attitude objects are used as primes for positive or negative adjectives • Results have shown clear evidence for automatic activation of the evaluation associated with an attitude object • Although, there is some disagreement about whether all attitudes are automatically activated, or if this effect holds only for strong attitudes • Bargh et al (1996) • Found that both strong and weak attitudes produced an automatic evaluation effect • Positive attitude object primes facilitated faster reaction times for responding to positive adjectives • Negative attitude object primes facilitated faster reaction times for responding to negative adjectives

27. Social Cognition and Attitudes: Automatic and Implicit Attitudes • Following the evidence that attitudes can be activated without deliberate intention or conscious awareness, in recent years social psychologists have begun to consider whether we may have attitudes that are outside of our conscious awareness • If conscious processing is not required for an attitude to be activated and have an effect, maybe we don’t need to be consciously aware of all the attitudes we have • Attitudes we are unaware that we have are called implicit attitudes • Implicit attitudes are like conscious attitudes in that they consist of a relatively stable association between an object and its evaluation • The BIG difference is that with implicit attitudes, the person holding the attitude may be unaware that they hold it • Implicit attitudes are “…introspectively unidentified (or inaccurately identified) traces of past experience that mediate favorable or unfavorable feeling, thought, or action toward social objects.” • In other words, implicit attitudes are evaluations of objects that people are unaware they hold

28. Social Cognition and Attitudes: Automatic and Implicit Attitudes • If we accept that: • A) we may hold attitudes that we are unaware of, AND/OR • B) that our automatic attitudes may be different from those attitudes that we are willing to deliberately endorse • A whole new problem for attitude theorists is created: • If our implicit and explicit attitudes are inconsistent or even contradictory, which should be considered to be our “true” attitude?

29. Social Cognition and Attitudes: Automatic and Implicit Attitudes • Wegner and Bargh • Argue that people are inclined to see automatic responses as more genuine because they are not subject to the self-presentation concerns that may affect the expression of more controlled responses • Meaning, since we can’t change an automatic response to make ourselves look better, it’s probably more genuine • Also argue that automatically activated attitudes are more important in some respects than controlled attitudes, because they are more likely to predict behavior • Dovidio et al. • Argued against a universal preference for automatic attitudes • Propose instead that implicit (automatic) attitudes may be important in predicting automatic behavior, while explicit (controlled) attitudes may be more likely to predict deliberate, considered behavior

30. Social Cognition and Attitudes: Attitudinal Ambivalence • If attitudes have multiple cognitive and affective elements, it follows that these different elements may not always lead to the same evaluation • People are said to have ambivalent attitudes when they have both positive and negative evaluations of the same target • Ambivalent attitudes are perhaps particularly likely for targets that are complex and differentiated and with which we have numerous encounters • Such as groups of people rather than for simple targets like olives

31. Social Cognition and Attitudes: Attitudinal Ambivalence • The possibility of attitude ambivalence has long been acknowledged by psychologists • Ambivalence has been associated with attitude instability and amplification • Ambivalent attitudes are considered unstable • The evaluation that is expressed in a particular moment will depend on which elements of the attitude are most accessible at that time • And, as there are large variations in the evaluations associated with different elements of ambivalent attitudes, the expressed evaluations of the target are likely to be correspondingly variable • Amplification • Refers to the tendency for people to make more extreme evaluations of targets toward which they hold ambivalent attitudes and less extreme evaluations of targets when attitudes are more straightforward

32. Social Cognition and Attitudes: Attitudinal Ambivalence • The realization that people often hold ambivalent attitudes has led to a rethinking of how attitudes should be measured • Traditionally, attitudes were measured by rating objects on bipolar evaluative dimensions • Good/bad, pleasant/unpleasant, warm/cold, etc. • However, these types of bipolar attitude measure facilitate a “midpoint problem” • Should neutral ratings on bipolar scales be interpreted as reflecting ambivalence or indifference towards the attitude object?

33. Social Cognition and Attitudes: Attitudinal Ambivalence • A person who selects a midpoint rating on a bipolar scale that rates politicians from good to bad may: • A) believe that some politicians are very good and others are very bad • B) believe that politicians have some very good qualities (like intelligence, public mindedness, enthusiasm) and other very negative qualities (like vanity, dishonesty, ruthlessness) • C) not have strong opinions about politicians • So, how do we know?

34. Social Cognition and Attitudes: Attitudinal Ambivalence • Kaplan’s solution: • Separate traditional bipolar semantic differential scales into separate unipolar measures of positive and negative attributes • Although this method has been adopted by researchers in a number of areas, notably in the measurement of intergroup attitudes • The use of bipolar semantic differentials is still common in many areas of attitude assessment

35. Social Cognition and Attitudes: Hierarchical Structure • Work on the spread of activation of attitudes largely assumes that each attitude exists as a discrete node in an associative network • Which has no structure other than horizontal associations formed through repeated co-exposure and rehearsal • However, in addition to these associated connections, we can also think of attitudes as existing in hierarchical relations to each other • In this view, some specific attitudes are thought to be instances of broader, more generalized attitudes

36. Ex. A person’s attitude towards paid maternity leave may reflect and/or be derived from the person’s more general attitude towards working mothers • Which may in turn reflect the person’s attitudes towards various aspects of feminism

37. Social Cognition and Attitudes: Hierarchical Structure • Kerlinger (1984) structure of political attitudes • Concerned with how social and political attitudes are organized • Prior research had suggested that these attitudes could be arranged in a bipolar way, ranging from liberal to conservative • In this view, liberalism is the opposite of conservatism • Someone who agrees strongly with a liberal item in an attitude scale is also presumed to disagree strongly with a conservative item in the scale

38. Social Cognition and Attitudes: Hierarchical Structure • Kerlinger suggested that the two ideologies of liberalism and conservatism do not exist in opposition to one another, but, rather are independent of one another • This model starts with social referents – the objects of social and political attitudes, such as abortion, real estate, trade unions, money, racial equality and patriotism • Some of the referents are said to be criterial for liberals and are criterial for conservatives • A referent is said to be criterial for someone if it is significant, or salient, to that person • Bipolar models would assume that referents criterial for liberals are also negatively criterial for conservatives, and vice versa • Kerlinger argues that liberals do not care about conservative referents and conservatives do not care about liberal referents • In other words, criteriality is generally positive or neutral, not negative • As an ideology, liberalism has one set of criterial referents and conservatism has its own set, and the two are independent

39. Social Cognition and Attitudes: Hierarchical Structure • Evidence for this model relies on the factor analysis of criterial ratings (both liberal and conservative) of a large number of referents by a large number of people • That is, the structure Kerlinger talks about is identified across, not within people • Although, it may also be represented as a structure within one person • Factor analysis of criterial ratings typically produces about a dozen first-order factors (like religiosity, racial equality, civil rights, morality, etc.) • When these first-order factors are themselves factor analyzed, they produce two orthogonal second-order factors: liberalism and conservatism • These second-order factors are what Kerlinger labels as ideologies – a collection of shared beliefs, attitudes and values organized around some coherent core and often associated with a particular group in a social structure

40. Social Cognition and Attitudes: Hierarchical Structure • Ideologies are shared • It is not possible for one person to “have” an ideology • They do not “exist” or “reside” within any one person • Rather, they are bodies of thought themselves • They only have life to the extent they are shared, an hence can be said to be truly and only social – they are the product of social relations

41. Social Cognition and Attitudes: Hierarchical Structure • Considering the structure of social and political attitudes as being built upon ideologies returns us to issues raised at the start of the chapter • Most of the work on attitudes has concerned the intra-individual structure of attitudes • Their accessibility • Whether they are changed to maintain consistency • How, if at all, attitudes are related to behaviors

42. Social Cognition and Attitudes: Hierarchical Structure • Work on the ideological nature of attitudes is relatively scarce, but still important • Intra-individual and inter-individual research are complementary to each other • Intra-individual, or micro-level, focuses on how attitudes work • Inter-individual, or macro-level, places attitudes in a social context, and illustrates their fundamental social character • Attitudes are social, in origin, function and consequence • They originate in social life, they communicate meaning, they are shared, and they have social consequences

43. Social Cognition and Attitudes: Functions of Attitudes • What are the functions of attitudes? • Psychologists have attempted to answer this question in two different eras • In the 1950s and from the mid-1980s on • Not much was done in between • In both of these eras, the focus is on the functions attitudes serve for the individual attitude-holder, and has ignored the broader social functions

44. Social Cognition and Attitudes: Functions of Attitudes • Katz (1960) proposed 4 functions of attitudes • 1) Knowledge function • Similar to the common understanding of what an attitude does • Attitudes help us explain and understand the world around us • Definition: an attitude is a memorial representation of an object, and associated with that representation are rules about the labeling of the object, an evaluative summary of the object and a knowledge structure about the object • The knowledge function of attitudes helps us know the world around us

45. Social Cognition and Attitudes: Functions of Attitudes • 2) Utilitarian function • Attitudes help us gain rewards and avoid punishments • Utilitarian function emphasizes the social consequences that follow from the expression of certain attitudes • To be “politically correct” is to hold and display attitudes for utilitarian reasons • The idea that attitudes can have utilitarian functions underscores the flexibility in people’s expression of their attitudes • People are likely to alter their “attitude” to some social object according to the social context they are in

46. Social Cognition and Attitudes: Functions of Attitudes • 3) value-expressive function • The expression of an attitude can sometimes be no more than a public statement of what a person believes or identifies with (probably strongly) • Ex. Political statements

47. Social Cognition and Attitudes: Functions of Attitudes • Stickers on car windows

48. Social Cognition and Attitudes: Functions of Attitudes • Slogan T-shirts

49. Social Cognition and Attitudes: Functions of Attitudes • Uniforms or sports teams

50. Social Cognition and Attitudes: Functions of Attitudes • Displayed clothing labels