PSYCH 3CB3 Attitudes and Persuasion

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Lecture 3
What is an attitude?
- Is there a real attitude?
- Differences between automatic and controlled
- Unconscious and conscious?
- Represented in memory?
- Constructed or stable traits?
o Personality and attitude are relatively stable
o Generally, attitude is very situational
- Knowledge versus endorsement?
Attitude?
- Is a spectrum of goodness or badness
o Liking or disliking
o Positive or negative
o Pleasant or unpleasant
- Approach or avoidance behaviour
- Amygdala has a process is emotions and attitude
What does an attitude do? Attitude-behaviour
- Does attitude predict behaviour?
o Stimulus yields behaviour
o Reality: stimulus primes an attitude that informs yielding behaviour
- Most indispensable concept in contemporary social psychology
- Thurstone: “the essential feature of attitude is a preparation or readiness for response…
not behaviour, but the precondition of behaviour”
Gordon Allport (1935)
- A mental or neutral state of readiness, organized through experience, exerting a directive
influence upon the individual’s response to all objects and situations with which it is
related
- Correlates with schemas and heuristics
- Attitude object: anything we have an attitude about
Russell Fazio (1980s)
 - Functional definition
o Attitudes are summary judgements of an objector event which aid individuals in
structuring their complex social environments (Fazio, 1986). Or an association
between a given object and a given evaluation (Fazio, 1989).
How do we talk about attitudes?
- Attitude object: anything we have an attitude about
o Beliefs (ideas about an object)
o Valence, aka “evaluation” (positive or negative)
- Complexity (number of elements in an attitude)
Attitudes: Making Social Judgements
- Attitudes are positive or negative evaluations of objects of thought
- Have cognitive, affective, and behavioural components
- Vary along dimensions: strength, accessibility, ambivalence
One of the best predictors or future behaviour is previous behaviour
Components:
- The ABC’s of attitudes
o A: Affective (liking, feeling for)
o B: Behavioural (how you behave toward object)
o C: Cognition (your beliefs/thoughts about object in question

Dimensions
- Strength
o Strong attitudes are:
 Firmly held (resistant to change)
 Durable over time
 Have powerful impact over behaviour
- Accessibility
o How often you think about the attitude
o Value expressive
o How quickly it comes to mind
o Highly accessible attitudes quickly and readily available
- Ambivalence
o Allows possibility if indifference
o Can be good and bad (ambivalence)
 Being lactose intolerant and loving ice cream
o Some evaluations may be neither good or bad (indifference)
 Nicholas Cage? Bad or good?
 Negative reaction
Low High
Positive Attitude Dual attitudes
(ambivalence) Positive reaction
Low High

Indifference Negative Attitude

Why Study Attitudes?

- Critical for survival
o Learning the good or bad
o Almost like conditioning
- Attitudes (may) influence behaviour
o Immediate behaviour
o Goals (choosing, attaining)
- Makes sense of unfamiliar situations
o Heuristics and schemas
- Predict behaviour
o People behave in ways consistent with their attitudes
- Attitudes influence social cognition
o Used to organize and interpret information about people, objects, situations, etc

Lecture 4: Measurement
Basic Issue
- Cannot be observed directly
- Person, reported attitude, and then behaviour
Operational Definitions
- Must move from abstract concepts to concrete representations (or measurements)
- Operational definition: specifies EXPLICITY how to measure a variable so that one can
get assigned a ranking for the construct (e.g., high, low, medium)
- Cant see attitudes, but they can be inferred
o Where to numbers come from?
o What do they mean?
 o Every step of research is continent on operational definition

Note
- Operational definitions are never completely adequate
- Necessarily shortcuts to simplify complex concepts into something that is more readily
studied
- Need to be specified so that others can redo the study, or challenge the shortcuts taken
Components of Observed Scores
- Observed score = true score + systematic error + random error
- Can never rid random error
o Some methods can be used to reduce
 Different methods have different systematic errors
o Reliability and validity

Reliability (Focus on consistent results)

- Refers to the consistency of a measure
- A test is considered reliable if we get same result repeatedly
o Test-Retest Reliability
 Test administered twice, at different times
o Inter-Rater Reliability
 Two or more independent judges score the test
o Internal Consistency
 Consistency of results of items across test
Validity (Focuses on adequacy of measure for test)
- The strength of our conclusions
- “best available approximation to the truth or falsity of a given inference, proposition or
conclusion”
- In short, were we right?
o Face Validity
 If a measure appears (on the fact of it) to measure what it is supposed to
measure
o Convergent Validity
 Convergent validity refers to the degree to which scores on a test correlate
with (or relate to) scores on other tests that are designed to assess the same
construct
o Discriminant Validity
 The degree to which scores on a test do not correlate with scores from
other tests that are not designed to assess the same construct
o Predictive Validity
 Does the scale do a good job of predicting future events
Measurement
- Explicit versus implicit
EXPLICIT measures
- Self-report questionnaires in which participants respond to direction questions about their
opinion
o Most common method
 Likert Scales
 Rate the extent to which they agree or disagree with statements
that express positive or negative sentiments toward an attitude
object
 Construct many different attitude items
 Item analysis eliminates non-discriminating items using item-total
correlations
 People respond to the selected items using five-point scale
 Semantic-Differential Scales
 People rate an attitude object on several bipolar adjective scales
(e.g., bad to good)
 Social Distance Scale (Bogardus, 1920)
 An argument for measuring attitudes towards members of social or
ethnic groups
 Based on the assumptions that one’s liking for a group is reflected
in the social distance that one finds acceptable in relationships with
members of the group
 People taking the scale indicate if they would willingly allow
certain ethnic groups into increasingly close relationships with
themselves
 Their score is the closest distance at which they find the
relationship with members of the target group acceptable
 One-Item Scale
 Although there are good psychometric reasons for using several
items to measure an attitude, often a single items does the trick
 Such an item can consist of a question that asks how positively or
negatively one feels about the attitude object
 Thermometer scale: where one is asked to indicate on a scale from
0 to 100 how warmly one feels towards the attitude object
Problems with EXPLICIT
- Awareness of attitude
- Dimensionality
o A measure (or score on a measure) is thought to measure only the construct of
interest
 o A score might reflect more than one construct
 Depression scales also measures anxiety
 Prejudice scale that also measures political conservatism
- P-Q; does not mean Q-P
o If prejudiced, more likely to be conservative
 Does not mean that if conservative then also prejudice
- Ambiguous items
o “Men and women should have equal rights”
o Question clarity
- Items with different variability
o Scaling the scale
o Applying weight to questions the strongly measure attitude object
- What do the extremes mean?
o Top of the scale is not equivalent to all people
o Pain scale
- Context/Anchoring
o How bad the concepts are depends on what is on the list
 Ex) morality of politicians
o Starting high and landing low
o Availability heuristic
 Use priming
 Pre-existing attitudes reflect availability heuristic
o Social Judgement Theory: Social judgement theory states that you have a
statement or message and you accept it or reject it based on your cognitive map
 How hot was it today? (assume +23 degrees)
 9 degrees is warm in winter
 Cold in summer
 On a 1 to 10 scale, VERY HOT means different things
- Impression Management
o Biggest problem on any scale
 Self-deception and social desirability
 Faking good or bad on a scale
 How often do you volunteer your time?
Problems with EXPLICIT….
- However, explicit measures do predict behaviour
o (to an extent)
Potential Solutions?
- Bogus pipeline
o Fake lie detector machine
  Show that participants might hide certain (especially undesirable) attitudes
until they felt they would be discovered
 Ethical issues. Deceptive
 What’s worse: lying, or sharing what someone might be embarrassed
about?
- Speeded responses
o Decreased response time may allude to increased truthful responses because it
takes less time to tell the truth
o Takes more time to lie. First recognizes truth and then creates lie
o What participant is in a practiced lie?
o What about individual differences?
- Computer administration
o Less trying to fake good/bad for an experimenter
o Problems with ambiguity
- “indirect” measures
IMPLICIT Measures
- Social psychologists have looked for ways to measure attitudes by recording subtle
behavioural and physiological indicators
- These approaches have the advantage of not requiring self reports that are under the
control of the respondent
Head Movement
- When people listen to messages they agree with, they tend to move their heads vertically
(nod) more than horizontally (shake)
- Some people don’t conform to this
- Cultural differences?
- How is it measured?
Eye Contact
- If two people like each other, they will make more eye contact than if they do not like
each other
- Cultural issues?
- More of a measure of arousal than “liking”
Response Latency
- How long does it take to decide something is good or bad?
o The faster one responds is an index of attitude accessibility, and this relates to
attitude strength
o Few issues, quality measurement
Evaluative Priming (Fazio, Jackson, Dunton, and Williams 1995)
 - Measured the extent to which the presence of an attitude object primes positive versus
negative evaluations
- Evaluative priming studies
o Positive or negative priming can affect response latency depending on the
evaluation from attitude objects used to prime
Implicit association task (IAT): measure of strength of association between 2 things
- “implicit” attitude or learned association?
o Often associations are deeply routed in upbringing and socialization
o But modern world is creating new associations, therefore implicit associations
might be weak or conflicting
- Scores are malleable
- Alternative scoring algorithms
- Generates baseline reactions time, takes an average time
- Looking for similarity in speed from different test variations to test strength of implicit
association
Physiological Measures
- Galvanic Skin Response (GSR)
o A drop in the resistance of the skin to the passage of a weak electric current,
usually measured in the palm of the hand, indicative of emotion or physiological
arousal
o When neutral words like ‘chair’ are presented to the participants, their GSR
remains neutral
o When pleasant words like ‘love’ are presented, GSRs were greater than usual
o Same responses are seen with unpleasant words
o The problem with GSR
 No way to distinguish between a positive and negative reaction, so it is not
a good indicator of attitudes
 The GSR also shows novelty reactions
- Pupil Response
o The pupil dilates in response to positive and negative stimuli than neutral stimuli
o Problem?
 Also reactions to novelty
 Pupil responds to other features of stimuli other than positive or negative
attitudes (cognitive effort can increase dilation)
- Facial Electromyography (EMG)
o An electrical recording of muscle activity in the facial region obtained by placing
electrodes on the face
o Usually the electrical activity being measured is that produced by the muscles
needed to smile and frown
 Zygomatic muscles for smiling
  Corrugator muscles for frowning
o Well-founded evidence
 Pro-attitudinal messages activate people’s zygomatic muscles
 Counter-attitudinal messages activate people’s corrugator muscles

Structure and Function of Attitudes

Intra-Attitudinal Structure
- 4 types of Models
o Unidimensional
 Until 1960s, attitude was viewed as:
 Affective or emotional orientation to an object along a single
dimension of favourability or unfavourability
 Affect response to an object, good or bad
 Semantic differential, Likert scale, social distance
 Ineffective when liking and disliking at the same time, or neutral
opinions
o Bidimensional
 For example, Schachter and Singer’s Two-Factor Theory
 2 components: affective and cognitive
 Emotions are derived from a combo of:
o Arousal and cognitions used to explain arousal
o Arousal + ideas about stimulus = behavioural reaction
 Right or wrong idea, will behave in alignment with
ideas of stimulus
 Horror movie date, arousal from movie and date
 Two-Factor Theory of Emotion
 1. If in a state of arousal with no immediate explanation, you
describe in terms of the cognitions available at the time
 2. If you have an explanation then you won’t. Instead, you’ll go
with the available explanation
 3. You’ll react the same way in similar situations if aroused
o Conditioning
 Suproxin Study (Schachter & Singer, 1962)
 Told the aim of the experiment was ‘to look at effects of vitamin
injections on visual skills’
 Adrenaline or placebo
 Four conditions
o 1. Control group (placebo-saline)
o 2. Adrenalin ignorant
o 3. Adrenalin misinformed
 o 4. Adrenalin informed
o Then allocated to an emotion inducing situation
 Euphoria Condition
o The happiest were the misinformed and ignorant groups
o Because only reason they would feel that way was because
the actor was so funny
o The lowest on the happy scale were the informed group,
because they knew what to attribute their physiological
response to
 Anger Condition (New experiment)
o The angriest were the misinformed and ignorant groups
o Th least angry were the informed group
 Because they knew why they felt that way
 Dimensional Model
Positive Attitude Dual attitudes (Russell, 2003)
(ambivalence)  Emotional
intensity
 Slide 14, topic
Indifference Negative Attitude 3A
 The Dimensionality of
Attitudes:
Good or
Bad?

Negative reaction
Low High

Positive reaction
Low High

 The dimensionality of attitudes

 To allow for the possibility of ambivalence and indifference,
attitudes might not be best defined as either good or bad
evaluations
 Some evaluations may be good and bad (ambivalence)
 Some evaluations may be neither good nor bad (indifference)
  Evaluative Space Model (Cacioppo & Berntson, 1994)
 Good to bad, with levels of activation
 Valence shows activation
 Bidimensional model, with three factors occuring
 Negativity bias
o Negative evaluations grab more attention than positive ones
 Positive offset, because neutral isn’t bad
 Bad things are weighted heavier than good things
o Neutrality is rare
What about the brain?
- EEG can look at brain activity associated with the processing of evaluative stimuli
- EEG
o Electroencephalograms: electrical activity recorded on the scalp
o Now we can look at the theory of whether there are separable positive and
negative components
o Event-Related Potential Technique (Cacioppo)
 Late positive potential (voltage potential)
 Evaluative incongruent stimuli
 Change valence, implicit association, targets and primes
 Begins about 400ms after stimulus presentation
 Takes this long to process difference
 Lateralized Late Positive Potential (Cunningham et al.)
o Processing of positive and negative stimuli
 Right – negative; left – positive
 Attitude extremity
Three dimensional model
- The Tri-Partition Model of Attitudes
o Some theories of attitudes assume that attitudes have three components:
 A cognitive component
 An affective component
 A behavioural component
o The ABCs
 All effect each other
o Evaluative Consistency of Constituents of Attitude
 There is typically associations between each of the components, and the
within component elements
 A change in one component (theoretically) “should” result in a change in
the other two
 Cognitive dissonance
  Not necessarily the case, a racist will get along with minorities to
accomplish a shared goal (contact theory)
Non-dimensional (Node Model)(Fazio, 1990)
- Attitude objects are nodes in an associative network
o Nodes as “mini-attitudes”
- Can think of an attitude as an association in memory between an attitude object and a
stored evaluation
- Attitude = the sum of cognitions and beliefs X evaluation
- More frequently used link is activated, the stronger the attitude
- Each time attitude is activated, the link gets stronger
- + and – evaluations with weighted values for nodes within networks
- Networks vary in complexity
o Toyota echo
- Explains indifference and ambivalence
Beliefs Associated with Attitudes (Fishbein and Ajzen, 1975)
- Like node model, but equation style
- How can we think about the relationships between attitudes and beliefs (or evaluation and
belief; or affect and belief)?
- Attitude = the sum of cognitions and beliefs X evaluation
o Fishbein and Azjen conceptualize their model like a spreadsheet with columns of
cognitions and corresponding evaluations
o Attitude = sum (belief X evaluation)

Syllogistic Model (McGuire 1960; Jones and Gerard, 1967)

- What is the link between beliefs and evaluations?
- Beliefs are the full set of what is known about the attitude object
- Each of the beliefs has an evaluative component
- In understanding our attitudes, we must consider there structural linkages
Syllogistic Model – Horizontal Structure
Defence spending creates jobs Defence spending prevents war
Creating jobs is good preventing war is good
- Therefore defence spending is good
The Function of Attitudes
Object Appraisal Function
- Why do we have attitudes, that is, persistent evaluations?
o Attitudes help us to make decisions faster
o Schemas and heuristics
 o Attitudes help us to make decisions in situations with insufficient information

Symbolic Politics Function

- Certain “political attitudes” mask other, related attitudes
- Attitudes toward affirmative actin may reflect attitudes toward race and ethnicity
- The “symbolic politics” allows some attitudes to be expressed in a more socially
desirable way
A Functional Approach
- Daniel Katz (1960) expanded on the notion that attitudes serve functions. He classified
attitudes into four different groups based on their functions:
o Utilitarian function
 Behaviouralist logic: people adopts attitudes that are rewarded and avoid
punishment
 Attitudes adopted for self-interest serve utilitarian function
o Knowledge function
 People need to maintain an organized, meaningful, stable view of the
world
 Attitudes can help them achieve this goal by making things fit together
and make sense
 Important values and general principles provide a framework for our
knowledge
 Equality
 Belief in a just world
 System justification theory
o Ego-defensive function
 Psychoanalytic
 People use defence mechanisms to protect themselves form
psychological harm
 These mechanisms include:
 Denial, repression, projection and rationalization
o Value-expressive function
 Serve to express one’s central values and self concept
 Central values, establish our identity, and gain social approval
 Example: attitudes toward a controversial political issue
Social Judgement Theory (Sherif and Sherif, 1967)
- Prior attitudes distort their perceptions of positions advocated by others
- Basically, our attitudes bias us
- Assume others hold the same values as us
Adaptation Level Theory
 - Judgments we make about stimuli that fall on a continuum
- Adaptation level theory posits that any stimulus that is experienced repeatedly will come
to feel neutral: we adapt to it
- Adaptation levels
o Judgments are not absolute. They are made in reference to adaptation level
o After a hot summer, we adapt to warm temperatures. 16 degrees is warm or cold
depending on adaptation levels
o Will an extreme positive event set the standard for other positive events?
- Adaptation in social circumstances (Brickman et al., 1978)
o Lottery winners
 Initially excited about winning the lottery
 Eventually become neural about it
 Excitement seems normal and feels neutral
 MONEY CAN BUY HAPPINESS, but plateaus and goes down
Evaluating Attractiveness (Kenrick and Gutierres (1980)
- Obtained attractiveness ratings in dorms
- Two groups of male students rated the attractiveness of pictures of average-looking
women, but one group rated the pictures after watching Charlie’s Angels
Adaptation vs Social Judgement
- Social judgement theory focuses on judgements and attitudes
- Attitudes vary on a continuum just like stimuli
- The critical point on the continuum is a person’s position, not the neutral level
- This position serves as an anchor (reference point) for judgements that the person makes
about arguments toward attitude objects
- The anchor is surrounded by a latitude of acceptance, a latitude of noncommitment and a
latitude of rejection
o “coming across the isle”
- Close arguments about an attitude object are close to their anchors
o Its in the latitude of acceptance – a range of arguments a person will agree and
accept as reflecting his or her own position
- Discrepant arguments
o When people hear arguments very far away from their own position (anchor)
 The arguments fall into their latitudes of rejection: a range of arguments
that are contrary to their position and which are discredited
 People see these arguments as being even farther away from their anchors
than they truly are (contrast effect)
- Close (a little further from anchor) Arguments
o When arguments are further away from their anchors:
 The arguments fall into their latitudes of noncommitment – a range of
arguments that seem reasonable but do not exactly reflect their position
Predictions
- When there is little discrepancy between a message and a person’s position
o There will be a lot of assimilation but not much attitude change
- When there is too much discrepancy between a message and a person’s position:
o The arguments will fall in the person’s latitude of rejection and the arguments will
be discredited and there will be no attitude change
- When there is little discrepancy (but not too much) the argument falls in the person’s
latitude of non-commitment
o There will be the most attitude change
- High credibility communicator
o Person has to believe it’s a highly credible person to effect position

Communicator Credibility
- The reason arguments are rejected when they fall in the latitude of rejection is that the
communicator can be discredited
- This is difficult to do when the communicator is very credible, so attitude change keeps
occurring even when the message falls in the latitude of rejection
- Authority, power, expertise
Ego-Involvement
- What happens when the person is very ego-involved in the issue?
- Say the person is a pro-life activist
- Will the persuasion curve be the same as for a person who doesn’t really care about the
issue?
- Less latitude of non-commitment, and more latitude of rejection
- Becomes an existential issue
Attitude Formation: Forms of Attitude Learning
Value-Expressive Function
- Serve to express one’s central values and self-concept
- Central values, establish our identity, and gain social approval
- Example: attitudes toward a controversial political issue
- From ideologies/values
Utilitarian Function
- Taxes
- Reward and punishment
Knowledge Function
- I believe I’m a good person
- Good things happen to good people
 - Something bad happens to bob
- Bo must not be a good person
- What if bad things happen to me?
Ego-Defensive Function
- Psychoanalytic: people use defense mechanisms to protect themselves from
psychological harm
- Authenticity is better
Downward Comparison Theory (Wills, 1981)
- By derogating a less fortunate other, we can increase our own subjective well-being
- Thing is likely to happen after we have ourselves suffered a misfortune or frustration
- Upward social comparison too
- Protect self-esteem
- E.g. after losing money on Wall Street, people may develop a more negative attitude
toward the homeless, which makes them feel better about themselves
- Morally separate self from “lower tier”
Psychological Reactance Theory (Brehm, 1966)
- Elimination of an available option creates a need to restore the lost option
- Paradoxically, this is expected to lead the person to value the lost option more highly than
before
- “Taking a break”
Automatic Forms of Attitude Learning: Evaluative Conditioning
Classical Conditioning (Pavlov’s dogs)
- Unconditioned stimulus yields unconditioned response
- Conditioned/neutral stimulus yields conditioned response
o Takes time for conditioned response to be activated
o Stimulus can be replaced with different stimuli
Evaluative Conditioning
- Similar to higher order conditioning
- Refers to changes in the liking of a stimulus due to the fact that the stimulus has been
paired with other, positive or negative stimuli
- Difference: evaluative conditioning is used as a term when humans are participants and
when emotions and attitudes rather than behaviour are the dependent variable
The Persistence of Conditioned Brand Attitudes
- Materials:
o Fictitious brand names
o Pleasant pictures
 - Procedure:
o Brand names were presented with neutral pictures (control) or with pleasant
pictures (experimental)
- Participants rated how much they like the brands (immediately or three weeks later)
- Conclusion
o Produced a more favourable attitude immediately after a product was paired with
pleasant pictures
o The effect persisted even three weeks later
o This finding suggests that simple associations of a stimulus with affective stimuli
can have lasting effects on attitudes
- All advertisements
Observational Evaluative Conditioning
- By observing another, you are indirectly exposed to CS-US contingencies
- E.x. Baeyens et al 1996
o Children’s liking of drinks was influenced by seeing an actor displaying either
displeasure or a neutral expression when drinking the same drink
- Conclusion
o Attitudes are not only influenced by reasoning and careful processing of relevant
info
 Attitudes are also influenced by many factors outside our awareness
o Unconscious influences on attitudes may explain why advertising is effective
even if most people believe that they are not influenced by it
 Coke vs Pepsi