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Attitudes
Attitudes are evaluations people make about objects, ideas,
events, or other people. Attitudes can be positive or negative. Explicit
attitudes are conscious beliefs that can guide decisions and behavior.
Implicit attitudes are unconscious beliefs that can still influence
decisions and behavior. Attitudes can include up to three components: cognitive,
emotional, and behavioral.
Dimensions of Attitudes
Researchers study three dimensions of attitude: strength, accessibility,
and ambivalence.
- Attitude strength: Strong attitudes are those that are firmly held and that highly influence behavior. Attitudes that are important to a person tend to be strong. Attitudes that people have a vested interest in also tend to be strong. Furthermore, people tend to have stronger attitudes about things, events, ideas, or people they have considerable knowledge and information about.
- Attitude accessibility: The accessibility of an attitude refers to the ease with which it comes to mind. In general, highly accessible attitudes tend to be stronger.
- Attitude ambivalence: Ambivalence of an attitude refers to the ratio of positive and negative evaluations that make up that attitude. The ambivalence of an attitude increases as the positive and negative evaluations get more and more equal.
The Influence of Attitudes on Behavior
Behavior does not always reflect attitudes. However, attitudes do
determine behavior in some situations:
- If there are few outside influences, attitude guides behavior.
- Behavior is guided by attitudes specific to that behavior.
- Behavior is guided by attitudes that come to mind easily.
The Influence of Behavior on Attitudes
Behavior also affects attitudes. Evidence for this comes from the
foot-in-the-door phenomenon and the effect of role playing.
The Foot-in-the-Door Phenomenon
People tend to be more likely to agree to a difficult request if they
have first agreed to an easy one. This is called the foot-in-the-door
phenomenon.
The Effect of Role Playing and the “Prison Study”
People tend to internalize roles they play, changing their
attitudes to fit the roles. In the 1970s, the psychologist Philip
Zimbardo conducted a famous study called the prison study,
which showed how roles influence people. Zimbardo assigned one group of
college student volunteers to play the role of prison guards in a
simulated prison environment. He provided these students with uniforms,
clubs, and whistles and told them to enforce a set of rules in the
prison. He assigned another group of students to play the role of
prisoners. Zimbardo found that as time went on, some of the “guard”
students became increasingly harsh and domineering. The “prisoner”
students also internalized their role. Some broke down, while others
rebelled or became passively resigned to the situation. The
internalization of roles by the two groups of students was so extreme
that Zimbardo had to terminate the study after only six days.
Attitude Change
Researchers have proposed three theories to account for attitude change:
learning theory, dissonance theory, and the elaboration likelihood model.
Learning Theory
Learning theory says that attitudes can be formed and changed through
the use of learning principles such as classical conditioning, operant
conditioning, and observational learning:
- Classical conditioning: The emotional component of attitudes can be formed through classical conditioning. For example, in a billboard ad, a clothing company pairs a sweater with an attractive model who elicits a pleasant emotional response. This can make people form a positive attitude about the sweater and the clothing company.
- Operant conditioning: If someone gets a positive response from others when she expresses an attitude, that attitude will be reinforced and will tend to get stronger. On the other hand, if she gets a negative response from others, that attitude tends to get weaker.
- Observational learning: Seeing others display a particular attitude and watching people be reinforced for expressing a particular attitude can make someone adopt those attitudes.
Dissonance Theory
Leon Festinger’s dissonance theory proposes
that people change their attitudes when they have attitudes that are
inconsistent with each other. Festinger said that people experience
cognitive dissonance when they have related cognitions that
conflict with one another. Cognitive dissonance results in a state of
unpleasant tension. People try to reduce the tension by changing their
attitudes.
The phenomenon called justification of effort also results from
cognitive dissonance. Justification of effort refers to the
idea that if people work hard to reach a goal, they are likely to value the
goal more. They justify working hard by believing that the goal is valuable.
The Elaboration Likelihood Model
The elaboration likelihood model holds that attitude change is more
permanent if the elaborate and thought-provoking persuasive messages are
used to change the attitude. Basically, if someone can provide a thorough,
thought-provoking persuasive message to change an attitude, he is more
likely to succeed than if he provides a neutral or shallow persuasive
message.
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