Attitude and attitude change - summary of chapter 7 of Social Psychology by Smith, E, R (fourth edition)

Social psychology
Chapter 7
Attitude and attitude change

Attitude: a mental representation that summarizes an individual’s evaluation of a particular person, group, thing, action or idea.
Attitude change: the process by which attitudes form and change by the association of positive or negative information with the attitude object.
Persuasion: the process of forming, strengthening or changing attitudes by communication.

Attitudes and their origins

Measuring attitudes

Researches infer attitudes from people’s reactions to attitude objects. Such reactions can range form subtle uncontrollable evaluative reactions that people are unaware of, to more deliberate and controllable expressions of support or opposition. Assessing these different reactions shows that implicit attitudes can sometimes differ from explicit attitudes.

Two aspects of people’s reactions are important for attitudes:

• Attitude direction: whether the attitude is favorable, neutral, or unfavorable
• Attitude intensity: whether the attitude is moderate or extreme

The most straightforward way to measure attitudes to through self-report.
Social psychologists usually get people to report their attitudes using attitude scales.
Researchers need to keep in mind that the words they use and the response options they offer can subtly change the attitudes people report.

Social psychologists also use observations of behavior to gauge attitudes.

Explicit attitude: the attitude that people openly and deliberately express about an attitude objecct in self-report or by behavior.
People can control their explicit attitudes to hide or deny their true attitudes.

Techniques to get around people’s desire to hide what they really think:

• Some self-report techniques guarantee anonymity
• Convincing them that their ‘real’ psychological reactions about issues are being measured, even when that’s not true.
• Assessing attitudes so subtly that participants are not aware of revealing their opinions.

Implicit attitude: automatic and uncontrollable positive or negative evaluation of an attitude object.
Measures:

• Assesses muscle activity around the mouth and brows using facial electromyography (EMG)
• The time people take to make a particular response to an attitude object

People’s explicit attitudes sometimes differ from their implicit attitudes.
Such differences don’t mean that implicit attitudes are pure measures of what people ‘really’ think about attitude objects, while their explicit attitudes are designed to dissemble or distort.
Implicit attitudes simply reflect the positive or negative associations that people have to an object.
Explicit attitudes are more likely to reflect the evaluations that people deliberately endorse, and these include the attitudes they want to have, not just the ones they want to be seen having.

Attitude function

People form attitudes about almost everything they encounter because attitudes are useful.

Attitues help people master the environment in two ways:

• The knowledge function: the way an attitude contributes to mastery by organizing, summarizing, and simplifying experience with an attitude object.
• Instrumental function: the way an attitude contributes to mastery by guiding our approach to positive objects and our avoidance of negative objects.

Attitudes are useful because they help us gain and maintain connectedness with others:

• Social identity function: the way an attitude contributes to connectedness by expressing important self and group identities and functions. Helping define ourselves.
• Impression management function: the way an attitude contributes to connectedness by smoothing interactions and relationships.

Any attitude can serve both mastery and connectedness.

Attitude formation

People combine the important, salient, and accessible positive and negative pieces of cognitive, affective, and behavioral information they acquire about an attitude object to form an attitude. That combination determines the direction and intensity of the attitude toward the object and can produce strong attitudes or ambivalent attitudes. Once an attitude is formed, it is associated with the attitude object.

The information base of attitudes

Association is everything.
People form a mental representation to an object and everything they associate with it.
This representation includes:

• Cognitive information, including the facts people know and the beliefs they have about an attitude object
• Affective information consisting of people’s feelings and emotions about the object
• Behavioral information, the knowledge about people’s past, present, or future interactions with the attitude object.

Attitudes can be based on just one type of information, or on any combination of these types of information.
Many attitudes reflect mainly cognitive information about attitude objects. Especially if that information comes from hearsay rather than direct experience.
Other attitudes are based primarily on affective information.

• We often get affective information before encountering cognitive information
• Affective information can be very strong and simply overwhelm cognitions.
• Some affective reactions may reflect inborn or genetic predispositions.

Information about behavior can also dominate our attitudes. Particularly if that behavior is habitual.

Putting it all together

Almost every piece of information reflects something good or bad about the attitude object.
People form attitudes that reflect the evaluative worth of what they know, feel and experience.
Having lots of positive information about an attitude object typically results in a positive attitude.

Not all information counts equally in determining an attitude.

• Important information usually out-muscles unimportant information. Important information is anything that matters to you.
• Negative information is more likely to be noticed, weighted more heavily when we combine information and is harder to ‘cancel out’ than positive information.
• Information that is accessible or salient dominates attitude judgments.

People combine the important, salient, and accessible positive and negative cognitive, affective and behavioral information they acquire about objects to form attitudes that differ in dimension and intensity.
If the most important, salient, and accessible information is positive, your attitude will be favorable.
Different mixes of information produce different attitudes.

More often than not, the information that we gather about any given object will be largely one-sided.
The bad will outweigh the good or vice versa.

• Most people interact with a majority of people who share their opinions.

Strong attitudes: a confidently-held extremely positive or negative evaluation that is persistent and resistant and that influences information processing and behavior.
Because their information is lopsided, it is very hard to change strong attitudes.

Ambivalent attitudes: an attitude based on conflicting negative and positive information.

Linking attitudes to their objects

Once we form an attitude about an attitude object, it becomes part of our mental representation of the object.
The more tightly coupled the attitude and the attitude object are, the more accessible the attitude is. Encountering the attitude object brings its associated attitude immediately to mind as well.

Superficial and systematic routes to persuasion: from snap judgments to considered opinions

Other people also find our attitudes useful. They try to influence you to develop new attitudes or change old ones.

Regardless of what is provided, people often do not go any further than superficial processing of information, so attitudes are often based on automatic associations or on accessible or salient information that triggers simple evaluative infere4nces about the attitude object.

Superficial processing: persuasion shortcuts

When people do not give persuasive communications much thought, various superficial aspects of the persuasive appeal can lead to attribute change.

Persuasion heuristic: association of a cue that is positively or negatively evaluated with the attitude object, allowing the attitude object to be evaluated quickly and without much thought.
Forming attitudes based on persuasion heuristics rather than thinking about the attitude object itself is sometimes described as taking a peripheral route to persuasion.

Attitudes by association

If other objects are repeatedly associated with an attitude object, the attitude object soon comes to elicit the evaluation associated with those other objects.
Evaluative conditioning: the process by which positive or negative attitudes are formed or change by association with other positively or negatively valued objects.
Evaluative conditioning can create powerful attitudes with only a few pairings.

People don’t even have to be aware of the associated positive or negative cues for evaluative conditioning to work.

Sometimes associations form coincidentally, because our feelings about one object or experience get mixed up with the attitude object.

The familiarity heuristic: familiarity makes the heart grow fonder

Repeated exposure to a stimulus increases people’s liking for it.
Mere exposure effect: people prefer things to which they have been more frequently exposed.
This is so powerful that it operates even when people are unaware of whether or how often they have seen the stimulus before. It is even stronger when people are unaware of how frequently they have been exposed to the stimuli.

It may have these effects because things we’ve encountered before are easier to process the second time around an easy is good.
Or because things we’ve encountered before and are still around to see again are inferred to be safe.

Because of the positive feelings associated with familiarity, familiar stimuli can also be more persuasive.
Familiarity makes other aspects of a persuasive appeal more effective too.

The attractiveness heuristic: agreeing with those we like

The expertise heuristic: agreeing with those who know

Because communicators with excellent credentials usually offer compelling arguments, people often associate them with opinions that should be respected.
Credibility or expertise heuristic leads people to accept the validity of a claim on the basis of who says it, not what is said.
Most pronounced when the recipient has little knowledge or no strong pre-existing attitude on the topic.

To be an expert, communicators must be competent.
Fast talkers also convey an image of expertise. As long as people can understand the gist of a message, the faster the message is delivered, the more objective, intelligent, and knowledgeable the communicator is seen to be.
Trustworthiness is the most important characteristic a credible communicator can have.

We are likely to be taken in by these ploys only if we are processing very minimally.

The message-length heuristic: length equals strength

If we are processing superficially, even the form of a persuasive appeal can help persuade us.
The longer the message, the more valid it appears to be, no matter what is says.
But, quantity does not always mean quality.
However, when a request is substantial enough to provoke more extensive processing, people will think more carefully about the reason.

Systematic processing: thinking persuasion through

Sometimes people carefully consider the content of arguments presented in a persuasive communication. When people pay attention to a message, understand its content, and react to it, a prcoss called elaboration, systematic processing changes attitudes.
Sometimes systematic processing also includes metacognition, or thinking about what those elaborations mean. Attitudes resulting from systematic processing last longer and are more resistant to later change than most attitudes produced by superficial processing.

Pocessing information about the attitude object

Systematic processing involves paying increased attention to the strenght and quality of information aboutthe attitude object.

A central route to persuasion in systematic processing:

• Attenting to information
  But uninformed attempts to attract attention to a persuasive message can backfire. Attention must be drawn to the message, not away from it.
• Comprehending information
  Attention does not guarantee comprehension
  When messages are easy to comprehend, people can recogize compelling or weak content and react accordingly.
  When messages are complex and difficult, people can miss the true attributes of the attitude object and fall prey to superficial heuristics.
• Reacting to information
  Elaboration: the generation of favorable or unfavorable reactions to the content of a persuasive appeal. Can be affective as well as cognitive.
  Sometimes people engaged in systematic processing go even further than elaborating on information about an attitude object. They also think about what those elaborations mean.
  Metacognition: thoughts about thoughts or about thougt processes.
  The more confident about their reactions people are, the more swayed they are by the valence of those reactions.
• Accepting or rejecting the advocated position

When systematic processing occurs, people’s reactions to information about the attitude object can be even more important than the concent of the information itself.
In effect, people persuade themselves.

The consequences of systematic processing

Attitudes that result form systematic thinking are both persistent and resistant.

Superficial and systematic processing: which strategy, when?

People process messages systematically only when they have both the motivation and the cognitive capacity to do so.
Motivation is high when the message is relevant to important goals.
Cognitive capacity is available when people have the abilitly to process and can do so without distraction.
People differ in levels of motivation and capacity to process different kinds of messages. Messages that match people’s motivation and capacity are most persuasive. Positve and negative emotions influence persuasion because they have consequences for motivation and capacity.
People often use a mix of superficial and systematic processing, meaning that cues and content can interact in some interesting ways.

Systematic processing or persuasive appeals requires a big investment of effort and ability.

Elaboration likelihood model (ELM): a model of persuasion that claims that attitude change occurs through either a peripheral route or a central route that involves alboration, and the extent of elaboration depends on motivation and capcity.

How motivation influences superficial and systematic processing

• Mastery motivation: the importance of being accurate
  When we are being held accountable for our preferences and are concerned about making the correct decision, mastery motives will predominate and issues of accuracy will be central.
  Accuracy conterns are often triggered when the evidence seems mixed.
• Connectedness motivation: the importance of relations with others
  Many of our most cherished goals have to do with other people and our connections to them.
• Me and mine motivation: the importance of self-relevance
  When information is relevant to something that affects us, we want to know all about it.

The relevance of personal goals almost always increases systematic processing of relevant information.

How capcacity influences superficial and systematic processing

Even when we are highly motivated, we may encounter obstacles to systematic processing.

• The ability to process.
• Opportunity to concentrate

How moods and emotions influence superficial ans systematic persuasive processing

Both feeling good and feeling bad can sometimes increase and sometimes decrease persuasion because they can all affect capacity and motivation.
Emotional reactions can be triggered directly from a persuasive appeal, or from events unrelated to the appeal.
Emotions affect capacity because almost all emotions involve some physiological arousal
Arousal and systematic processing are related in a curvilinear way.

By definition, emotions have motivational consequences and thus can facilitate or impede persuasive processing.

• Positive emotions signal a benign environment about which no additional processing is necessary.
• Negative emotions convey that something is wrong, and that the situation requires additional processing.

Multiple motivational and capacity factors are at work when emotions are experienced.
Both positive and negative emotions can increase or interfere with persuasion, depending on their motivational and capacity consequences in particular circumstances. If moods reduce either motivation or capacity, persuasion is more likely to depend on superficial processes and less on systematic processing.

Interplay of cues and content

People often use a mix of superficial and systematic processing and that means that cues and content can interact in some interesting ways.

• Persuasion-relevant information can play multiple roles when it comes to changing attitudes.
• People might engage in both types of processing about the same persuasive message simultaneously and so superficial and systematic processing can work together or at cross-purposes. When a heuristic cue and careful processing suggest the same attitude, the two types of processing can have additive effects.

But sometimes content processing is at odds with the cue. This can lead to attenuation, whereby the impact of the heuristic cue on your attitudes may be weakened considerably by careful processing.

• When message content is not convincingly strong or weak, processing can be biased by heuristic cues.

Defending attitudes: resisting persuasion

Ignoring, reinterpreting, and counering attitude-inconsistent information

People protect established attitudes by:

• Ignoring-
• Reinterpreting-
• Resisting-

-information that is inconsistent with them.
Being forewarned of a persuasion attempt and having previous experience with related arguments makes peruasion easier to resist, and resisting attitude change can make established attitudes even stronger.

Inoculation: practice can be the best resistance medicine

People do an even better job of protecting their opinion if they are forewarned, or know in advance they are going to be attacked.

• They marshal arguments to mount a good defence
• The more successful they resistpersuasion.

The most effective way to resist persuasion is to practice arguing against a persuasive appeal.

Working hard to counter or argue a persuasive attempt can have consequences

• We can end up with more extreme views
• We come to hold an opinion with more certainty.

What it takes to resist persuasion

Because it involves careful thinking, resisting attitude change depends on having the motivation and capcaity to fight off a persuasive attempt. Many people overestimate their ability to resist persuasive appeals.