What is this chapter about?
This chapter provides an overview of attitudes and their role in social psychology, with a particular focus on measurement, attitude-behavior consistency, and the social and cultural context of attitudes. Attitudes and their functions are explained, including the affective, cognitive, and behavioral components of attitudes. The chapter als gives a discussion of the historical development of attitudes research, including the early work of Allport and the emergence of the cognitive perspective.
Then it covers the relationship between attitudes and behavior, including the classic attitude-behavior debate and the factors that can influence this relationship, such as the strength of the attitude and the situational context.
The chapter also explains attitude measurement and discusses various methods for assessing attitudes, such as self-report measures, implicit measures, and physiological measures.
This chapter also explores the social and cultural contexts that shape attitudes, such as social norms, group identity, and intergroup relations. The chapter also discusses the role of attitudes in prejudice, discrimination, and social inequality.
What are attitudes?
How did attitude research develop?
Early attitudes research was largely focused on understanding the structure and measurement of attitudes. In the 1930s and 1940s, Gordon Allport and his colleagues developed the idea of functional autonomy, which suggested that attitudes could develop independent of the original motivations that led to their formation. Allport also proposed the concept of attitude strength, which refers to the degree to which an attitude is firmly held and influences behavior.
In the 1950s and 1960s, there was a shift towards understanding the cognitive processes involved in attitude formation and change. This period saw the emergence of the cognitive perspective, which posited that attitudes were not simply a result of direct experience or socialization, but were also influenced by cognitive processes such as evaluation and belief formation. Researchers began to explore the role of cognitions such as beliefs, values, and emotions in shaping attitudes, and the processes by which these cognitions were acquired and changed.
One influential theory that emerged from this period was the cognitive dissonance theory, which proposed that people experience psychological discomfort when their attitudes and behavior are inconsistent, leading to efforts to reduce the dissonance through attitude change or rationalization. The self-perception theory, which posits that people infer their attitudes from their behavior and the context in which it occurs, also emerged during this period.
The 1970s and 1980s saw the development of the elaboration likelihood model, which proposed that attitude change could occur through either a central route, in which people carefully consider the arguments and evidence presented, or a peripheral route, in which people are swayed by superficial cues such as the attractiveness of the communicator. This model emphasized the importance of both cognitive and social factors in shaping attitudes.
Later on in this chapter, you’ll learn more about these theories and models, as they are still significant in social psychology today.
What are attitudes composed of?
Attitudes are evaluative responses that individuals hold toward people, objects, or events. They
.....read more
Add new contribution