Lecture 5: attitudes and persuasion

Attitudes
Definition: an attitude is a summary evaluation of attitudinal object (or target)

Target
 A person, group, thing, action, or idea

Evaluation
 Generally involves positive or negative impressions
o (“direction”) e.g., like-dislike; good-bad; fun-boring
 Experienced to varying degrees
o (“intensity”)

Ajzen (1991): attitude toward (a behaviour) is the degree to which (performance of the
behaviour) is positively or negatively valued

Attitudes: components

Attitudes: dimensions
 Awareness: implicit vs explicit
 Strength: durability and impact
 Importance: personal relevance
 Accessibility: ease of activation
 Complexity: specific vs general
 Ambivalence: negative and positive feelings
 Coherence: internal consistency
Measurement of attitudes

Explicit
1. Likert scales
 Construct statements about target
o Statements could be beliefs, emotional reactions, behavioural reports
o the intensity of the idea is captured by the participant’s response:
 rate statements on spectrum of agreement
o “Strongly disagree” <---> “Strongly agree”
 Obtain attitudinal direction and intensity
 Difference in rating scales
o Overall quantity of options (5, 7, 9point answer options)
o Even/ odd number of options
2. Semantic differentials
 Use predetermined evaluative dimensions and apply to attitude object
o “endpoints” of the measurement are opposite adjective pairs that
have an ± evaluation built in
Limitations
o Suitability of adjective pairs to the object
o Difficult when ambivalent attitudes are likely e.g., alcohol
consumption
o well suited to compare different attitudinal targets in polarity profiles
3. Guttman scaling
 Construct items reflect increasing intensity
 cumulative: people favouring later options should also favour earlier ones
o individual attitudes determined by the point where agree  disagree
o “how far they go up the attitudinal latter”
Limitations
o Difficulty in constructing scale, ensuring items are cumulative
o Requires pretesting for scale construction

Implicit
1. Electromyography (EMG)
 based on involuntarily facial expression
 Measures the muscle activity around brows and mouth
  Can be used to measure attitudes when people are unwilling or unable to
express their attitudes verbally
Limitations
o High effort and costs
2. Implicit association test (IAT)
 based on reaction times to positive and negative judgments about attitudinal
object
limitations
o effortful to create, good to use for existing concepts

attitude change: persuasion

because attitudes can guide behaviour, many people want to influence them, in areas such
as:
 purchasing (e.g., eco-friendly products, fast food)
 policy support (e.g., COVID lockdowns)
 interpersonal processes (e.g., liking and loving)

which route do we take?

Peripheral route – heuristics

 1. Association

Evaluative Conditioning makes use of pairing neutral object (e.g. pen /coke) with a
positive evaluated stimulus (e.g. popular music/ beach) that evokes positive feelings
• when people are feeling good, they are more likely to have favourable
attitudes

• Positive mood...
• decreases motivation to process messages deeply
• decreases capacity to devote attention to message
• hence, encourages superficial processing (and use of heuristic cues)

2. Familiarity
The “mere exposure effect” (Zajonc, 1968):
people prefer things to which they have been more frequently exposed

Classic experiment on unknown “Turkish words” (Zajonc, 1968):

• Please try to pronounce the following words
• How positive or negative is the meaning of this word?
 People rated words they had heard previously and tried to pronounce more positively
than unheard words

3. Attractiveness
 We tend to agree with people we like and we tend to like attractive people
 Attractive people:
o are more liked
o are agreed to more often (Byrne, 1971)
o get more support to sign a petition (Chaiken, 1979)
o even if they upfront about using their attractiveness! (Messner,
Reinhard & Sporer, 2008)

4. expertise
 People are influenced by the attitudes of experts and those in power
  People rely on the credibility of the source
o need to believe that source is competent and trustworthy
 Cues to expertise/authority
o information: statistics; facts and figures
 person:
o official positions/titles (e.g., CEO)
o clothing (e.g., uniform)
o qualifications (e.g., PhD)

5. message-length
 When processing superficially, longer messages are perceived to be more
valid, even if they lack extra content

6. Consistency
People try to maintain consistency over time

This results in having a particular attitude about something, or doing or saying something
simply because we previously did that or had that attitude.
 attitudes being resistant to change

 “Foot-in-the-door” technique
o if people first agree to small request (commitment)...
o more likely to later agree to a similar but larger request

7. scarcity
Where opportunities to own or experience an object are limited or hard to obtain (scarce), it
appears more attractive

 Collectibles are usually scarce things - records, stamps, shoes

 scarce > abundant

 [abundant  scarce] > [constantly scarce]
 [high demand  scarcity] > [accident  scarcity]
 [constantly abundant] > [scarce  abundant]

8. Consensus
 Social norms: Attitudes/behaviours of others guide our own
 others provide ‘social proof’ of the correct or approved attitudes and actions
 Example: TV – canned laughter