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6th edition
Social Psychology
Elliot Aronson
University of California, Santa Cruz
Timothy D. Wilson
University of Virginia
Robin M. Akert
Wellesley College
slides by Travis Langley
Henderson State University
Chapter 7
Attitudes and Attitude
Changes:
Influencing Thoughts
and Feelings
“By persuading others,
we convince ourselves.”
— Junius
THE NATURE AND ORIGIN OF
ATTITUDES
Advertising can have powerful effects.
• Until the early twentieth century, men bought
99% of cigarettes sold. Then advertisers began
targeting female buyers.
• In 1955, there were twice as many male as
female smokers in the United States.
• Although the smoking rate has decreased
overall, women have almost caught up to men.
In 2004 23% of adult men smoked, compared
to 19% of adult women.
Source of image: Microsoft Office Online.
THE NATURE AND ORIGIN OF
ATTITUDES
• Although the smoking rate has decreased
overall, women have almost caught up to men.
In 2004 23% of adult men smoked, compared
to 19% of adult women.
• But is advertising responsible?
• To what extent can advertising shape
people’s attitudes and behavior?
• Exactly what is an attitude, anyway, and
how is it changed?
Source of image: Microsoft Office Online.
THE NATURE AND ORIGIN OF
ATTITUDES
People are not neutral observers of the
world.
They evaluate what they encounter.
They form attitudes.
Attitudes
Evaluations of people,
objects, and ideas.
THE NATURE AND ORIGIN OF
ATTITUDES
Attitudes are made up of three parts that together
form our evaluation of the “attitude object”:
1. An affective component, consisting of your
emotional reactions toward the attitude object.
2. A cognitive component, consisting of your
thoughts and beliefs about the attitude object.
3. A behavioral component, consisting of your
actions or observable behavior toward the
attitude object.
THE NATURE AND ORIGIN OF
ATTITUDES
1. What is your affective reaction when you see a
certain car?
– Perhaps you have feelings of excitement.
– If you are a U.S. autoworker examining a new foreignmade model, maybe you feel anger and resentment.
2. What is your cognitive reaction?
– What beliefs do you hold about the car’s attributes?
– Perhaps you admire its hybrid engine that makes it one
of the most fuel efficient cars you can buy.
3. What is your behavioral reaction?
– Do you go to a dealership and test-drive the car and
actually buy one?
Where Do Attitudes Come From?
One provocative answer that some attitudes, at
least, are linked to our genes.
• Identical twins share more attitudes than
fraternal twins, even when raised in different
homes, never knowing each other.
• Some attitudes are an indirect function of our
genetic makeup, related to things like our
temperament and personality.
Where Do Attitudes Come From?
Even if there is a genetic component, our
social experiences clearly play a large
role in shaping our attitudes.
Not all attitudes are created equally.
Though all attitudes have affective,
cognitive, and behavioral components,
any given attitude can be based more on
one type of experience than another.
Cognitively Based Attitude
An attitude based primarily on people’s
beliefs about the properties of an
attitude object.
Sometimes our attitudes are based
primarily on the relevant facts, such as
the objective merits of an automobile.
• How many miles to the gallon does it
get?
• Does it have side-impact air bags?
Affectively Based Attitude
An attitude based more on people’s feelings
and values than on their beliefs about the
nature of an attitude object.
Sometimes we simply like a car,
regardless of how many miles to the
gallon it gets.
Occasionally we even feel great about
something or someone in spite of having
negative beliefs.
If affectively based attitudes do not come
from examining the facts, where do they
come from? They can result from:
1. People’s values, such as religious and
moral beliefs,
2. Sensory reaction, such as liking the
taste of chocolate ,
3. Aesthetic reaction, such as admiring a
painting or the lines and color of a car,
4. Conditioning.
Classical Conditioning
The phenomenon whereby a stimulus
that elicits an emotional response is
repeatedly paired with a neutral stimulus
that does not until the neutral stimulus
takes on the emotional properties of the
first stimulus.
Classical conditioning works this way:
A stimulus that elicits an emotional response is
accompanied by a neutral stimulus that does not
until eventually the neutral stimulus elicits the
emotional response by itself.
• Suppose that when you were a child, you
experienced feelings of warmth and love when
you visited your grandmother.
• Suppose also that her house always smelled
faintly of mothballs.
• Eventually, the smell of mothballs alone will
trigger the emotions you experienced during
your visits, through the process of classical
conditioning.
Operant Conditioning
The phenomenon whereby behaviors that
people freely choose to perform increase
or decrease in frequency, depending on
whether they are followed by positive
reinforcement or punishment.
Operant Conditioning
In operant conditioning, behaviors we freely
perform become more or less frequent,
depending on whether they are followed by a
reward (positive reinforcement) or punishment.
How does this apply to attitudes?
Imagine:
• A 4-year-old white girl goes to the playground
and begins to play with an African American
girl.
• Her father expresses strong disapproval, telling
her, “We don’t play with that kind of child.”
• It won’t take long before the child associates
interacting with African Americans with
disapproval, thereby adopting her father’s racist
attitudes.
Although affectively based attitudes come
from many sources, we can group them
into one family because they:
(1)Do not result from a rational examination of
the issues,
(2)Are not governed by logic (e.g., persuasive
arguments about the issues seldom
change an affectively based attitude), and
(3)Are often linked to people’s values, so that
trying to change them challenges those
values.
Behaviorally Based Attitude
An attitude based on observations of
how one behaves toward an attitude
object.
According to Daryl Bem’s (1972) selfperception theory, under certain
circumstances, people don’t know how
they feel until they see how they behave.
We can form our attitudes based on our
observations of our own behavior.
Behaviorally Based Attitude
An attitude based on observations of
how one behaves toward an attitude
object.
People infer their attitudes from their behavior only
under certain conditions.
1. Their initial attitude has to be weak or
ambiguous.
2. People infer their attitudes from their behavior
only when there are no other plausible
explanations for their behavior.
Explicit versus Implicit Attitudes
Explicit Attitudes
Attitudes that we consciously
endorse and can easily report.
Implicit Attitudes
Attitudes that are involuntary,
uncontrollable, and at times unconscious.
Explicit versus Implicit Attitudes
Consider Sam, a white, middle-class college
student who genuinely believes that all races
are equal and abhors any kind of racial bias.
This is Sam’s explicit attitude, in the sense that it
is his conscious evaluation of members of other
races that governs how he chooses to act.
For instance, consistent with his explicit attitude,
Sam recently signed a petition in favor of
affirmative action policies at his university.
Explicit versus Implicit Attitudes
Sam has grown up in a culture in which there are
many negative stereotypes about minority
groups, however, and it is possible that some of
these negative ideas have seeped into him in
ways of which he is not fully aware.
When Sam is around African Americans, for
example, perhaps some negative feelings are
triggered automatically and unintentionally. If
so, he has a negative implicit attitude toward
African Americans.
Explicit versus Implicit Attitudes
People can have explicit and implicit
attitudes toward virtually anything, not just
other races.
For example, students can believe explicitly
that they hate math but have a more
positive attitude at an implicit level.
HOW DO ATTITUDES CHANGE?
• When attitudes change, they often do so in
response to social influence.
• Our attitudes toward everything from a
presidential candidate to a brand of laundry
detergent can be influenced by what other
people do or say.
• This is why attitudes are of such interest to
social psychologists—even something as
personal and internal as an attitude is a highly
social phenomenon, influenced by the imagined
or actual behavior of other people.
Changing Attitudes by Changing Behavior:
Cognitive Dissonance Theory Revisited
As we noted in Chapter 6, people experience
dissonance:
• When they do something that threatens their
image of themselves as decent, kind, and
honest.
• Particularly if there is no way they can explain
away this behavior as due to external
circumstances.
When you can’t find external justification for your
behavior, you will attempt to find internal
justification by bringing the two cognitions (your
attitude and your behavior) closer together.
Changing Attitudes by Changing Behavior:
Cognitive Dissonance Theory Revisited
Suppose you don’t want to rub your new father-inlaw the wrong way by arguing with him about
politics. You might go along with a mildly positive
remark about a politician you actually dislike.
Counterattitudinal advocacy, a process by which
people are induced to state publicly an opinion or
attitude that runs counter to their own private
attitudes, creates dissonance.
When this is accomplished with a minimum of
external justification, it results in a change in
people’s private attitude in the direction of the
public statement.
Persuasive Communication
Communication (e.g., a speech or television
ad) advocating a particular side of an
issue.
How should you construct a message so that it
would really change people’s attitudes?
Persuasive Communications
and Attitude Change
Yale Attitude Change Approach
The study of the conditions under which
people are most likely to change their
attitudes in response to persuasive
messages, focusing on “who said what
to whom”—the source of the
communication, the nature of the
communication, and the nature of the
audience.
The Central and Peripheral
Routes to Persuasion
Elaboration Likelihood Model
An explanation of the two ways in which
persuasive communications can cause attitude
change:
• Centrally, when people are motivated and have
the ability to pay attention to the arguments in
the communication.
• peripherally, when people do not pay attention
to the arguments but are instead swayed by
surface characteristics.
The Central and Peripheral
Routes to Persuasion
Under certain conditions, people are motivated to
pay attention to the facts in a communication,
and so they will be most persuaded when these
facts are logically compelling.
Central Route to Persuasion
The case whereby people elaborate on a persuasive
communication, listening carefully to and thinking
about the arguments, as occurs when people
have both the ability and the motivation to listen
carefully to a communication.
The Central and Peripheral
Routes to Persuasion
Under other conditions, people are not motivated
to pay attention to the facts; instead, they notice
only the surface characteristics of the message,
such as how long it is and who is delivering it.
Peripheral Route to Persuasion
The case whereby people do not elaborate
on the arguments in a persuasive
communication but are instead swayed by
peripheral cues.
The Motivation to Pay Attention
to the Arguments
One thing that determines whether people
are motivated to pay attention to a
communication is the personal relevance
of the topic:
• How important is the topic to a person’s
well-being?
The Motivation to Pay Attention
to the Arguments
The more personally relevant an issue is,
the more willing people are to pay
attention to the arguments in a speech,
and therefore the more likely people are
to take the central route to persuasion.
The Motivation to Pay Attention
to the Arguments
Need for Cognition
A personality variable reflecting the
extent to which people engage in and
enjoy effortful cognitive activities.
People high in the need for cognition are more likely to
form their attitudes by paying close attention to
relevant arguments (i.e., via the central route),
whereas people low in the need for cognition are
more likely to rely on peripheral cues, such as how
attractive or credible a speaker is.
The Ability to Pay Attention
to the Arguments
When people are unable to pay close
attention to the arguments, they are
swayed more by peripheral cues.
• Status of communicator
• Liking or trusting communicator
Therefore someone with a weak argument
can create distractions (e.g., loud music)
to make people more susceptible to
peripheral influence.
How to Achieve Long-Lasting
Attitude Change
Compared to people who base their
attitudes on peripheral cues, people who
base their attitudes on a careful analysis
of the arguments will be:
• More likely to maintain this attitude over
time,
• More likely to behave consistently with
this attitude,
• More resistant to counterpersuasion.
Emotion and Attitude Change
• Before people will consider your carefully
constructed arguments, you have to get
their attention.
• One way is to grab people’s attention by
playing to their emotions.
Source of images: Microsoft Office Online.
Fear-Arousing Communications
Fear-Arousing Communications
Persuasive messages that attempt to
change people’s attitudes by
arousing their fears.
Source of image: Microsoft Office Online.
Fear-Arousing Communications
Do fear-arousing
communications work?
• If a moderate amount of fear is
created and people believe that
listening to the message will teach
them how to reduce this fear, they
will be motivated to analyze the
message carefully and will likely
change their attitudes via the central
route.
Source of image: Microsoft Office Online.
A group of smokers who watched a graphic film depicting lung cancer and
then read pamphlets with specific instructions about how to quit smoking
reduced their smoking significantly more than people who were shown
only the film or only the pamphlet.
Fear-Arousing Communications
Fear-arousing appeals will also
fail if they are so strong that
they overwhelm people.
If people are scared to death,
they will become defensive,
deny the importance of the
threat, and be unable to think
rationally about the issue.
Source of image: Microsoft Office Online.
Emotions as a Heuristic
Heuristic–Systematic Model of Persuasion
An explanation of the two ways in which
persuasive communications can cause
attitude change: either systematically
processing the merits of the arguments or
using mental shortcuts (heuristics) –
(e.g., thinking, “Experts are always right”)
Emotions as a Heuristic
Interestingly, our emotions and moods can
themselves act as heuristics to determine
our attitudes.
When trying to decide attitude about
something, we often rely on the “How do I
feel about it?”-heuristic.
If we feel good, we must have a positive
attitude; if we feel bad, it’s thumbs down.
Emotions as a Heuristic
• The problem with the “How do I feel about it?” heuristic
is that we can make mistakes about what is causing
our mood, misattributing feelings created by one
source to another.
• If so, people might make a bad decision.
• Once you get a new couch home, you
might discover that it no longer makes
you feel all that great.
• Advertisers and retailers want to create good feelings
while they present their product (e.g., by playing
appealing music or showing pleasant images), hoping
that people will attribute at least some of those feelings
to the product they are trying to sell.
Source of image: Microsoft Office Online.
Emotion and Different
Types of Attitudes
Several studies have shown that it is best
to fight fire with fire:
• If an attitude is cognitively based, try to
change it with rational arguments.
• If it is affectively based, try to change it
with emotional appeals.
Emotion and Different
Types of Attitudes
• Some ads stress the objective merits of a
product, such as an ad for an air conditioner or
a vacuum cleaner that discusses its price,
efficiency, and reliability.
• Other ads stress emotions and values, such as
ones for perfume or designer jeans that try to
associate their brands with sex, beauty, and
youthfulness, rather than saying anything about
the objective qualities of the product.
• Which kind of ad is most effective?
Culture and Different
Types of Attitudes
• Perhaps people in Western cultures base their
attitudes more on concerns about individuality
and self-improvement, whereas people in Asian
cultures base their attitudes more on concerns
about their standing in their social group, such
as their families.
• If so, advertisements that stress individuality
and self-improvement might work better in
Western cultures, and advertisements that
stress one’s social group might work better in
Asian cultures.
RESISTING PERSUASIVE
MESSAGES
Attitude Inoculation
Making people immune to attempts to
change their attitudes by initially
exposing them to small doses of the
arguments against their position.
Source of image: Microsoft Office Online.
RESISTING PERSUASIVE
MESSAGES
Being Alert to Product Placement
• When an advertisement comes on during a TV
show, people often decide to press the mute
button on the remote control or to get up and
get a snack.
• To counteract this tendency to tune out,
advertisers look for ways of displaying their
wares during the show itself.
• With this technique, called product placement,
companies pay the makers of a TV show or
movie to incorporate their product into the script.
RESISTING PERSUASIVE
MESSAGES
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RESISTING PERSUASIVE
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Resisting Peer Pressure
• Peer pressure is linked to values and emotions, playing
on their fear of rejection and their desire for freedom
and autonomy.
• In adolescence, peers become an important source of
social approval—perhaps the most important—and can
dispense powerful rewards for holding certain attitudes
or behaving in certain ways, such as using drugs or
engaging in unprotected sex.
• What is needed is a technique that will make young
people more resistant to attitude change attempts via
peer pressure so that they will be less likely to engage
in dangerous behaviors.
RESISTING PERSUASIVE
MESSAGES
Resisting Peer Pressure
• One possibility is to extend the logic of the attitude
inoculation approach to more affectively based
persuasion techniques, such as peer pressure.
• In addition to inoculating people with doses of logical
arguments that they might hear, we could also inoculate
them with samples of the kinds of emotional appeals
they might encounter.
Source of image: Microsoft Office Online.
When Persuasion Attempts Boomerang:
Reactance Theory
Reactance Theory
The idea that when people feel their
freedom to perform a certain
behavior is threatened, an
unpleasant state of reactance is
aroused, which they can reduce by
performing the threatened behavior.
Source of image: Microsoft Office Online.
WHEN WILL ATTITUDES
PREDICT BEHAVIOR?
The relationship between attitudes and behavior is not
simple, as shown in a classic study (LaPiere, 1934):
• In the early 1930s, Richard LaPiere embarked on a crosscountry sightseeing trip with a young Chinese couple.
• Prejudice against Asians was common in the United States
at this time, so at each hotel, campground, and restaurant
they entered, LaPiere worried that his friends would be
refused service.
• To his surprise, of the 251 establishments he and his
friends visited, only one refused to serve them.
• And yet when surveyed, only one replied that it would
serve a Chinese visitor. More than 90 percent said they
definitely would not; the rest were undecided.
Predicting Spontaneous Behaviors
Attitudes will predict spontaneous behaviors only
when they are highly accessible to people.
Attitude Accessibility
The strength of the association between an
attitude object and a person’s evaluation
of that object, measured by the speed
with which people can report how they
feel about the object.
Predicting Deliberative Behaviors
Theory of Planned Behavior
The idea that the best predictors of a
person’s planned, deliberate behaviors
are the person’s attitudes toward
specific behaviors, subjective norms,
and perceived behavioral control.
Predicting Deliberative Behaviors
Specific behaviors: The theory of planned behavior
holds that only specific attitudes toward the
behavior in question can be expected to predict
that behavior.
Subjective norms: We also need to measure
people’s subjective norms—their beliefs about
how people they care about will view the
behavior in question.
Perceived behavioral control: Intentions are
influenced by the ease with which they believe
they can perform the behavior.
THE POWER OF ADVERTISING
It turns out that people are influenced by
advertisements more than they think.
The results of over three hundred split
cable market tests indicate that
advertising does work, particularly for
new products.
Effective ads worked quickly,
increasing sales substantially
within the first six months
they were shown.
Source of image: Microsoft Office Online.
THE POWER OF ADVERTISING
Subliminal Messages
Words or pictures that are not consciously
perceived but may nevertheless influence
people’s judgments, attitudes, and behaviors.
Simply stated, there is no evidence
that the types of subliminal
messages encountered in
everyday life have any influence
on people’s behavior.
Source of image: Microsoft Office Online.
Advertising, Cultural Stereotypes,
and Social Behavior
• Advertisements transmit cultural
stereotypes in their words and images,
subtly linking products with desired
images.
• Advertisements can also reinforce and
perpetuate stereotypical ways of thinking
about social groups.
Source of image: Microsoft Office Online.
• Gender stereotypes are particularly pervasive in
advertising imagery.
• Men are depicted as doers, women as observers.
Advertising, Cultural Stereotypes, and
Social Behavior
Stereotype Threat
The apprehension experienced by
members of a group that their behavior
might confirm a cultural stereotype.
6th edition
Social Psychology
Elliot Aronson
University of California, Santa Cruz
Timothy D. Wilson
University of Virginia
Robin M. Akert
Wellesley College
slides by Travis Langley
Henderson State University