What is an attitude?

What are Attitudes?

• An attitude is an individual’s evaluation of a

target
• target might be a person, an issue, an object, a group, a behaviour
• Attitudes always have a target
• the thing toward which the attitude is held
• Ideologies or values
• Controversial issues
• People
• objects
Think about some of your own attitudes...
Attitude about food
Definition

• A learned predisposition to respond in a consistently favorable or

unfavorable manner toward an object, person, or behavior.
• Relatively stable organization of beliefs, feelings, and behavior
tendencies directed toward something or someone.
• An attitude is an individual’s evaluation of a target (Eagly &
Chaiken, 1993; Wood, 2000..)
• The target can be an object, an issue, a person, a group, a behaviour, or
any other identifiable aspect of the environment (e.g., a colour, an
emotion).
Three Parts of Attitudes

• Affective
• our feelings or beliefs toward the attitude target
• Cognitive
• our knowledge of the attitude target
• Behavioural
• How we have acted towards the targe in the past
Negative attitude toward cockroaches
• Positive or negative attitude depends on three things
1. How the object makes the personal feel
2. The person’s beliefs about the object
3. The person’s previous actions towards the person.
Aspects of Attitudes

• Attitudes influence behavior, behavior influences attitudes

• a two-way relationship
• Attitudes can contain conflicting elements
• affective and cognitive elements may be mixed, for example
• this produces ambivalent attitudes
• Attitudes can be explicit or implicit
• The two-way relation between attitudes and behaviour
• Previous behaviour toward a target may contribute to an individual’s current
attitudes toward the target.
• E.g. I must really hate cockroaches because I have killed them in the past
• Feelings, beliefs, and past behaviour are the three components of attitudes.
• Past behaviours influence current attitudes, and current attitudes
influence future behaviour.
• If people have behaved positively toward something in the past, they are
more likely to judge that they like it, whereas if they have behaved
negatively toward something, they are more likey to judge that they dislike
it.
• People’s feelings, beliefs, and past actions toward a target are
reasonably consistent with one another (Positive or negative)
• Think about your attitude towards your close or best friend
• Think about your towards the garbage
Explicit Vs Implicit attitude

• Explicit attitudes are those • An implicit attitude is

that people can report spontaneous, immediate,
consciously good-bad response to the
• You can report these attitudes target that cannot be
confidently on a self-report consciously controlled.
scale. • Automatic responses
 What is the purpose of
attitudes? Why do we evaluate?
• Object appraisal function (Fazio,2000)
• attitudes provide the rapid evaluation of people, objects, and events
• attitude give the individual a quick assessment (appraisal) of whether targets
are likely to be helpful or hurtful
• Value-expressive function
• Humans use their attitude to express their identity and their values a lot.
• Convey an identity that connects them to some groups and makes them
distinct from other groups
• Religious partisans adopt specific positions on issues to show their support for their
faith.
Group Discussion

• Are functions of attitudes similar across the time and individuals?

Measuring Attitudes

• Self-report measures rely on people’s judgments of their attitudes

• Likert scales
• Thurstone scales
• semantic differential scales
• opinion surveys
• Self-reports assume that people know their
attitudes and will report them honestly
• Ambivalent attitudes also pose a problem
Example self report measures

• There is no excuse for being unhealthy.

_____ Strongly agree (5)
_____ Agree (4)
_____ Undecided (3)
_____ Disagree (2)
_____ Strongly disagree (1)
Self Report Scale

• Circle the statement which is most consistent with your attitude

towards the health of others
• Some people can’t help but be unhealthy
• In some instances, unhealthiness is beyond a persons control
• In many cases, unhealthiness is beyond a persons control
• There is no excuse for being unhealthy
Nonverbal Measures of
Attitudes

• Behavioural measures rely on overt behaviour to infer attitudes

• Participants to go into a room where another person was waiting and
conduct a brief interview
• ....participants in the negative attitude condition sat further away from
the individual and smiled less often than did participants in the positive
attitude condition
(Hazlewood and Olson, 1986)
• Physiological measures
• Exposure to negative or disliked objects increases arousal- such as heart
rate and blood pressure.
• include measures of arousal and muscle action- especially the eye and
cheek.
Pavlov’s (1927) experiment
How Do Attitudes Form?

• Affective sources of attitudes

• evaluative conditioning: good feelings become associated with a
previously-neutral object through classical conditioning
Mere exposure effect
◼ Familiarity breeds contempt
◼ Repeated exposure to an object can increase liking for that object
◼ What is the reason?
• One possibility is that we are uncertain about how to respond to novel objects, and
this uncertainty is unpleasant.
• When we come to know the object better, there is less uncertainty about how to
respond to it.
• Can you think of other examples of the more exposure effect in
real life?
Cognitive sources of attitudes
Behavioural sources of attitude...

• Self-perception theory
• We cannot directly “feel” our internal states, we may infer them from our actions.
Attitudes can be based on behavioural information- specifically, information about
own past behaviour toward the target
Physiological Processes and
Attitudes
• Alcohol myopia
• intoxication reduces cognitive capacity, which narrows focus of attention
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H9X7c74Ej5g
• MacDonald, Zanna & Fong (1995, 1996) study at University of Waterloo...
• Are older people generally more conservative than younger
people?
• Older people are not consistently more conservative than younger people
Attitudes Across the
Lifespan
• Early experiences affect attitudes
• parental socialization shapes attitudes
• Parents express opinions and values that children may
internalise.
• Can you think of times when your parents expressed a value such as
honesty and tried to explain why it was important?
Parental styles influence children’s values in
adulthood
• Restrictiveness (physical punishment, demands for sexual
modesty)
• Restrictive parenting was associated with obedience and politeness
• Non-restrictive parenting
• Non-restrictive parenting was associated with greater emphasis on
imaginativeness and independence
• Warm parenting style
• Warm parenting style associated with greater emphasis on freedom and
personal responsibility
• Cold parenting style
• Cold parenting style was associated with safety issues such as family
and national security
• Non-restrictive and warm parenting styles
• These findings suggest that non-restrictive and warm parenting styles,
which give children autonomy and acceptance, are more likely to instil
adult values that encourage independence and caring relationships with
others.
(Kasser, Koestner & Lakes, 2002)
 How Do Attitudes Affect
Behaviour?
• Rational choice
• the theory of reasoned action argues that humans are rational decision
makers guided by logical beliefs
How Do Attitudes Affect
our Perception?
• Selective perception
• attitudes can have a biasing effect
• people see what they expect to see
• Schemas or concepts
• If we have positive attitude towards a co-worker, we will be predisposed to notice
positive things about him or her and to interpret ambiguous information positively;
exactly opposite will occur if we have a negative attitude towards the co-worker.
• Media coverage
• the hostile media phenomenon describes how endorsers of both sides of
an issue perceive the media as biased against them
When Do Attitudes Predict
Behaviour?
• Attitude strength
• strongly held attitudes are better predictors of behaviour... People are
willing to sacrifice.
• Attitude controllability
• lack of control can lead to attitude inconsistent behaviour
• Attitude behaviour match
• measuring attitudes and behaviour at the same level of specificity
Culture and Attitudes

• Individualism and collectivism shape attitudes

• Power distance shapes attitudes
• However, we are probably more alike than different
• there are significant cross-cultural similarities in attitudes
• Questions?