ATTITUDE DEFINITION, INTRODUCTION

DEFINE

Attitudes:- positive and negative evaluations of people, ideas, objects, and events or other objects of
thought

“Objects of thought” may include: PAGE IS C

Entities ( a lecture, restaurant, a film) People ( Minister, Friend) Abstract Concepts (Civil rights ,
Abortion) Social issues (capital punishment)

Groups (liberals, farmers), Institutions (the church, the Supreme Court), Consumer products
(biscuits , computers),

INTRODUCTION

Social psychologists use the term attitude to refer to people’s evaluation of almost any aspect of the
world. People can have favorable or unfavorable reactions to issues such as climate change, objects, a
specific person, or entire social groups.

The study of attitudes is central to the field of social psychology because attitudes are capable of
coloring virtually every aspect of our experience. Even when we do not have strong attitudes toward a
specific issue, related values can influence what attitudes we form.

TYPES

Many attitudes are explicit attitudes—conscious and reportable—others may be implicit attitudes—less
controllable and potentially not consciously accessible to us.

While social psychologists can learn people’s attitudes about many objects from their conscious reports
of the thoughts and feelings they have about them, another approach is required if we want to learn
someone’s implicit attitudes—that is, attitudes they may be either unwilling or unable to report.

IAT

A method for assessing these is the Implicit Association Test (IAT). The IAT is based on the fact that we
may associate various social objects more or less readily with positive or negative descriptive words.

Research by Williams, Paluck, and Spencer-Rodgers (2010) using the IAT obtained evidence that male
references (e.g., man, son, husband) were automatically associated with wealth-related terms (e.g., rich,
cash, paycheck) as indicated by faster response latencies to those pairings than with female references
(e.g., mother, aunt, daughter).

Drawbacks – 1. Although the IAT is viewed by some investigators as an important way to “get inside your
head,” a criticism that has been leveled at this test is that it really assesses commonly known
connections between social groups and various attributes, even though the respondent might not
actually endorse the validity of those connections. That is, one might be fully aware of a common
negative stereotype regarding a particular social group, but not personally concur with that negative
belief. Because implicit measures may be assessing familiarity with the culture rather than an
individual’s actual attitudes, the meaning of IAT scores remains controversial.
2. Research has revealed that the IAT is susceptible to deliberate faking and that people are often aware
of and surprisingly accurate in predicting their IAT responses.

A review of research comparing implicit and explicit attitudes indicates that they reflect distinct
evaluations of the world around us, and implicit attitudes can predict some behaviors better than
explicit attitude measures.

ATTITUDE AND BEHAVIOUR

Social psychologists view attitudes as important because they often do influence our behavior. This is
especially likely to be true when attitudes are strong and accessible.

Attitudes can also affect important behavioral choices that have long-term consequences, so it is
important to understand how they influence decision making.

Suppose you receive an e-mail from your student health services office encouraging you to get the flu
shot this fall in order to avoid potentially catching the flu? What factors are likely to influence your
choice to do so or not? Because people differ in the extent to which they give weight to future
consequences, this might affect how information about getting vaccinated is processed and therefore
attitude-based decisions.

Morison, Cozzolino, and Orbell (2010) proposed the model shown in Figure 5.5 where considering future
consequences can lead to more positive thoughts about a message concerning a vaccine’s benefits and
risks, and these thoughts should predict attitudes toward the vaccine.

To test their model, these investigators first assessed parents’ tendencies to consider future
consequences of their decisions, and then gave them balanced information concerning the benefits and
risks of having their daughters vaccinated for the human papilloma virus (which causes cervical cancer in
women). After reading the information about the virus and vaccine, parents listed their thoughts about
it, which were later coded as positive or negative. Then, attitudes toward the vaccine were measured, as
was anticipated regret if they did not have their daughter vaccinated and she gets the virus in the
future. Finally, the parents’ agreement to have their daughter vaccinated was assessed. Results
supported the model: Parents who think more about future consequences of their actions generated
more positive thoughts (relative to negative thoughts) about the vaccination, which in turn predicted
more positive attitudes toward the vaccine and greater anticipated regret of not doing so—both of
which fed into choosing to have their daughter vaccinated.

So, sometimes attitudes are formed on the basis of careful consideration of the information and, once
those attitudes are formed, they can predict behavior in important domains such as medical decision
making. People who consider the future consequences of their actions reported more positive than
negative thoughts about a vaccine after reading balanced information about its potential benefits and
risks, and this predicted their attitudes about the vaccine and the extent to which regret for not acting
was anticipated—which then predicted the decision to agree to receiving the vaccination.