ATTITUDES

Initial thoughts
 Attitudes and expression of identity
– Identity function
– Utilitarian function
 Interdiscplinary analysis
– Behaviorism
– Other fields
 Classic debate: attitude neutrality (?)
 Neutrality vs. Ambivalence vs. “No information”
– Measurement?
 Societal value
 Possible?
 Why Neutrality is Difficult

 #1 Automaticity of attitudes
 #2: mere exposure effect
 Zajonc (1968)
– The “Turkish word” study
 e.g., saricik, kadirga, ikitaf
 0, 1, 2, 5, 10, or 25 exposures

 pronounce aloud each time

 Guess good vs. bad meaning

 Moreland and Zajonc (1973)
 Subliminal presentation (4 ms)

Test phase:
–“old” vs. and “new” symbols
–Recognition task: chance level
–Liking: old symbols preferred
 Additional information about mere exposure effect
 The effects of repeated exposure depend on initial
appraisal of the stimulus

Initially liked, or neutral: increased liking, but:

Initially disliked: increased disliking
 Classic Problems in Attitude
Measurement
1. Response alternatives not
appropriate
2. Acquiescence (yea-saying) biases
3. Framing
Examples

Abortion
Pro-life vs. pro-choice; “fetus” vs. “unborn child”, etc…
Cloning

“What is your attitude toward research on animal

cloning?”
“Ifresearch on animal cloning could be used to
advance our ability to prevent cancer, would you be in
favor of such research?”
4. Social desirability effects (Goffman,
1959).

Social
desirability
“true”
attitude

Fundamental problem: “how much” of response is due to one

factor or other.
 “Classic” (older) approaches
 Vary context in which responses are made
 The “Bogus Pipeline” (Jones & Sigall, 1971)
– Participants “practice” on machine, to convince that can
detect truth from lying
– Then asked to express honest attitudes toward mix of
new attitudes, some mundane, some socially sensitive
 Older approaches, continued
 Disguise/mask what’s being asked
– “Symbolic” attitudes
Overtly
Underlying attitude A1 expressed
(socially unacceptable ) attitude A2
 examples of “symbolic” attitudes (Kinder,
1986)
 “____ students receive too much financial assistance from the
university” (Boneicki, 1998)

 “Discrimination against Blacks is a thing of the past” (McConahay,

1986)

 “Downtown St. Louis has too much crime”

Potential advantages vs. disadvantages?

Tradeoff: efforts to disguise question threaten
construct validity
 Newer approach: Implicit Attitudes
 Attitude object (prime)  target
– Presentation of prime assumed to facilitate or inhibit
response to the target
– Semantic priming
 “chocolate” “food” (semantic priming)
– Evaluative priming
 “chocolate”  “good” (direct)
 “chocolate”  “flower” (indirect)
 “chocolate”  “disgusting”

 Types of implicit priming tasks
Lexical decision tasks: decide whether target is a word or not

“Word
or non-
prime target decision word?”

chocolate “good” response

RT
measured
xxxxxxxx “good” response
 Lexical decision tasks, continued

 Construct facilitation indices

– RT (xxxxx  good) – RT (chocolate good)
– (500 milliseconds) - (200 milliseconds) = 300 ms
– 300 ms represents implicit attitude index
 Evaluative decision tasks
 Verysimilar to lexical decision, but
judgmental decision different
Is it a
prime target decision good or
a bad
word?
chocolate desirable response

xxxxxx desirable response

some brief demonstrations
 Summary
 If “A” and “B” are associated in memory, then presenting A should make B more accessible
 Consequences of accessibility: faster to decide if B is
– a word (lexical decision)
– positive or negative (evaluative decision)
 Why implicit attitudes potentially
interesting
 Potential dissociation
 Conscious vs. unconscious
 Implicit attitudes less “contaminated” by
self-presentational bias (?)
 Implicit attitudes “purer” measures of true
attitudes (???)
 Strong argument:
separate systems view
Automatic Implicit
(unconscious)
system tasks

Controlled
(conscious) Explicit
system tasks
 The critics speak
“just another attitude measure”
 predictive validity?
– see Lambert, Payne, Shaffer, & Ramsey (2005)

 assumptions may be incorrect

– strong correlations sometimes found
– controllability of reactions to implicit tasks?
 “No such thing as a process-pure measure”
– Larry Jacoby
– No task 100% automatic
– No task 100% controlled
 More realistic view?

Automatic Implicit
system
tasks

Controlled Explicit
system
tasks
Subliminal Advertising?
 Historical Background
 The James Vicary incident (late 1950s)
– Popcorn sales increase by 50%, he says.
 Media reaction:
 Minds have been “broken and entered” (The New Yorker,
9/21/57)
 “The most alarming and outrageous discovery” since the

invention of the machine gun (The Nation, 10/5/57)

 FCC bans subliminal advertising

 People’s current views toward
subliminal vs. “regular” advertising:

 Subliminal ads feared more, believed to be

more effective (Wilson et al. 1998)
 Subliminal self-help tapes
– $50 million as of 1990
 Evidence?
 Vicary’s claims: fabricated!
 No evidence that subliminal advertising
works in real-life contexts
 Note: Regular advertising EXTREMELY
powerful, but people believe that they are
immune to it (Wilson & Brekke, 1994)
 Subliminal influence
in laboratory settings—
growing evidence
 So why no evidence (yet) that
subliminal advertising works
outside of the laboratory?
 “Noisy” contexts?
 Temporal distance?
 Fixed attitudes hard to change?
 Maybe does exist, just harder to measure
 Could subliminal priming be used
to enhance self-esteem?
 “I like myself, but I don’t know why: Enhancing implicit self esteem by
subliminal evaluative conditioning” (Dijksterhuis, 2004)
 Modified lexical decision task
 The word “I” presented for 17 milliseconds, followed by…
– 50% trials: positive adjectives (e.g. Warm, sweet, nice, sincere, honest,
beautiful, cheerful, smart, strong, wise, healthy, funny, nice)
– 50% trials: non words
 Control participants: positive adjectives replaced with neutral words
(e.g. table)
 Results show enhanced self-esteem, immunity to failure feedback
– Replicates across six experiments