Social Psychology

Jane Callaghan, Lisa Lazard

• Publisher: Learning Matters
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9780857252814
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Social Psychology
• Index: Psychology

This introductory social psychology text addresses the core knowledge domains of the subject, with key chapters on understanding identities, attribution theory, attitudinal research, social influence, racism and prejudice, class and exclusions, methodologies of social psychology and discursive psychology. It provides concise and focused coverage of the central concepts, research and debates in this key area, while developing students? higher level skills.

Activities help readers build the underpinning generic critical thinking and transferable skills they need in order to become independent learners, and to meet the relevant requirements of their programme of study.

Chapter 1
Attitudes

Learning outcomes

By the end of this chapter you should:

– have developed a detailed understanding of key research on attitudes;

– understand the core limitations of mainstream research on attitudes;

– demonstrate a critical understanding of social representations as a more ‘social’ alternative to individual attitudinal research;

– demonstrate an understanding of alternative trends in studies on this topic, including discursive approaches;

– have an understanding of how to analyse a piece of text for its attitudinal content, and have a basic understanding of how to design an attitudinal questionnaire, offering you the opportunity to develop your skills in creative and critical thinking.

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Introduction

The word attitude is a familiar part of our vocabulary and routinely creeps into our everyday conversations. We may use the notion of attitudes when trying to figure out what others think or feel about objects, individuals or events. We may also draw on the concept when evaluating the behaviour of others. For instance, it is not uncommon to talk of people ‘having’a healthy attitude, a realistic attitude or even an attitude problem! We assume that once we know someone’s attitude towards an object, person or event we can, to a greater or lesser extent, know how they will behave towards it. Our pervasive use of ‘attitude’ in daily life is reflected in the way we often take it for granted that people simply ‘have’ attitudes. That is to say, ‘attitudes’ are often treated as though they are a fundamental characteristic of being human. Given that these everyday ideas about attitudes seem intuitively to be true, it may come as a surprise that these taken-for-granted assumptions have been contested within psychological research. In this chapter, we will explore how psychology has attempted to define, measure and explain the notion of attitudes. We will look at common questions asked by psychologists in this field, including: How can attitudes be measured? How do attitudes relate to behaviour? We attempt to show the limitations of traditional research by examining alternative understandings of this topic.

The place of attitudes in psychology

The importance attributed to the notion ‘attitude’ in social psychology is succinctly captured by Allport (1935) who describes the concept as indispensable (p798). Allport was not alone in this view. Other researchers have since claimed that attitudes remain a crucial concept in social psychology (for example, Petty et al., 1997; Conner and Sparks, 2002; Gawronski, 2007). So why are attitudes so important? In early psychological work, it was generally thought that attitudes were the key for understanding human behaviour. The pervasiveness of this view is reflected in early definitions of the field of social psychology itself as the scientific study of attitudes (Thomas and Znaniecki, 1918; Watson, 1925; see also Ajzen and Fishbein, 2005). While recent definitions of social psychology rarely focus on attitudes to this degree, this does not mean to say that the concept has lessened in importance for some researchers. This can be seen in Petty and Wegener’s (1998) claim that:

Attitudes remain important . . . [in] the 21st century because of the fundamental role that individual attitudes . . . play in the critical choices people make regarding their own health and security as well as those of their families, friends and nations. From purchase decisions provoked by liking the product to wars spurred by ethnic prejudices, attitudes help to determine a wide variety of potentially consequential outcomes.

(Petty and Wegener, 1998, p323)

In Petty and Wegener’s description, it would seem that attitudes have a powerful impact on our day-to-day activities. This quote suggests that our attitudes shape the things that we do and exert considerable influence on a myriad of our mundane as well as more critical choices and experiences throughout our lives. For some researchers then, the job of unpacking the nature of attitudes is a crucial step in understanding human action. At this point it would not be unreasonable to ask: But what exactly are these things called attitudes? How and why are they influential on our behaviour? We will turn to these questions in the following sections.

Defining attitudes

As we saw above, mainstream psychological interest in the topic of attitudes has a very long history. Given that attitudes have been the central focus of much research produced in social psychology, we might expect that researchers are by now pretty confident about what constitutes an attitude and that there would be a fair degree of consistency and consensus about what definition(s) we could and should use in psychology. Interestingly, this is not the case. There has been considerable disagreement as to how to define ‘attitude’ and what components make up this construct. This is aptly illustrated by Fishbein and Ajzen (1972). In their review of attitude research, they identified over 500 operational definitions of the construct!

In early research on the topic, there was a general tendency for researchers to use very broad definitions of what attitudes are. An example of this is Allport’s (1935) famous definition, which described an attitude as a mental and neural state of readiness, organised through experience, exerting a directive or dynamic influence on the individual’s response to all objects and situations with which it is related (p810).

For Allport, then, an attitude is a feature of our internal world (or something in our heads) that is acquired and shaped by our experiences and which actively and directly influences what we do and how we behave towards the ‘thing’ our attitude is about. For example, Bert has a positive attitude towards his boss – in fact, he thinks she’s great! He has lots of positive experiences of her – she praises his work when he does well, doesn’t make him feel bad when he gets something wrong and she is good at managing her team. His attitude is reflected in his behaviour at work – he speaks highly of his boss and tries to do the best he can to please her. It seems, then, that Bert’s attitude can explain his behaviour in the workplace. If we extended this to look at all Bert’s attitudes it would seem, on face value, that we could reasonably predict and account for how Bert behaves towards the range of ‘attitude objects’ or things he comes across in his life.

At first glance, Allport’s definition might ring true. However, things are rarely that simple. Let’s look a little more closely at Allport’s definition. We could argue that this broad definition is a little vague if we start unpicking the definition further and asking questions like: What exactly is a ‘mental and neural state of readiness’? We could argue that saying that an attitude is some sort of internal feature of individuals that induces them to act in certain ways does not move us very far in understanding what an attitude is. As Krosnick et al. (2005) point out: It is hardly surprising that attitudes were seen as the central construct of social psychology, for they were whatever internal sets or predispositions motivated behaviour (p22).

Broad definitions favoured in early research gave way to some extent to the tripartite model of attitudes developed by the ‘Communication and Attitude Change program’ at Yale University in the 1950s and 1960s. Underpinning this model was the understanding of attitudes as predispositions to respond to certain classes of stimuli with certain classes of response (Rosenberg and Hovland, 1960, p3). In other words, attitudes can be thought of as our immediate inclination to respond in certain ways to the thing or object we have an attitude about. In the tripartite model, the kinds of response we have to the object of our attitude are made up of three major components.

• Cognitive component – the knowledge or beliefs we have about the attitude object.
• Affective (or evaluative) component – how we feel about the attitude object (for example: Do we like it? Do we dislike it?).
• Behavioural (or conative) component – how we intend or think we ought to behave towards the attitude object.

Each of the three components involves evaluating the attitude object in a specific way, but crucially the evaluations produced by each component may differ substantially. For example, Bert is up for promotion at work but hates being interviewed (negative affective component). That said, he understands that job interviews are a good way to assess someone’s work competencies and provide him with an opportunity to demonstrate his skills (positive cognitive component). He therefore accepts the offer of an interview for the promotion (favourable behavioural or conative component).

It is reasonably easy to think of examples from our own experiences where what a person says they think about an attitude object doesn’t match their behaviour or vice versa. The fact that the model allows for some inconsistency in responses from the three components could be seen as an attempt to account for the complexity of everyday behaviour. An examination of these three components was undertaken by Breckler (1984), who asked university students to fill out an attitude questionnaire in the presence of a real caged snake. The cognitive component was assessed by asking students whether they agreed or disagreed with knowledge-based statements (for example, ‘Snakes control the rodent population’). They were also asked about how they felt about the snake (I feel happy; I feel anxious), which was designed to tap into the affective component. The behavioural component was measured by asking students what they thought their responses to the snake might be (I’ll scream; I’d like to pick it up), as well as observations of the students’ behaviour with the actual snake. Breckler argued that this study showed that the three different responses (cognitive, affective and behavioural) could be seen as three components of an attitude. Breckler also argued that correlations among the three components were high – our thoughts, feelings and behaviours are related to each other.

Breckler’s study gives the impression that it is reasonably easy to separate out the three components of an attitude. This, however, has certainly not been the case in other studies using the tripartite model. Indeed, there has been some confusion and disagreement about how to distinguish between components. For example, Ajzen (2005) argues that measures used in some studies that are intended to measure the cognitive component have been used in other studies to measure the affective component. This may well reflect the difficulties of conceptually separating aspects of the cognitive and the affective. This is perhaps best highlighted by a substantial claim in the field that people can display large inconsistencies in their cognitive, affective and behavioural component responses to an attitude object (for example, Eagly and Chaiken, 1993). Importantly, this has implications for what has been one of the major questions in mainstream psychological research: Do attitudes predict behaviour? It could be argued that it is not necessarily the case that if we know something about the other component responses we can predict the behavioural component response.

The relationship between attitudes and behaviour in the tripartite model can be considered straightforward on one level – behaviour is one component that makes up a part of the attitude construct. However, if we want to tackle the question of whether attitudes predict behaviour using this model, then the situation becomes a little more challenging. The relationship between attitudes and behaviour becomes a matter of definition in this model – attitudes must impact behaviour because behaviour itself is part of an attitude! It becomes very difficult then to ask common questions such as ‘Do attitudes predict behaviour?’ because in this model, behaviour is not and cannot be separated from the attitude itself. It can thus be argued that this model skims over the complexities of the relationship between internal processes and overt action. It is issues such as this that have led to the tripartite model’s decline in popularity.

An assumption underpinning the use of the tripartite model (and many other definitions used in attitudinal research) is that attitudes are relatively enduring and so do not change significantly over long periods of time. While it is acknowledged that attitudes might change if we encounter new experiences or new ways of understanding the attitude object, a large body of mainstream research generally sees attitudes as fixed. The idea that attitudes are reasonably stable can be problematic because it throws a question mark over the possibility of individual (as well as broader social) change. One definition that avoids this problem can be found in the work of McGuire (1985) who described an attitude as responses that locate ‘objects of thought’ on ‘dimensions of judgement’ (p239). What this means is that when we consider an issue, idea or topic (for example, an object of thought), we respond to it by evaluating it, which involves placing ‘the object of thought’ in a hierarchy (dimensions of judgement). For example, Bert is asked which of his colleagues – Ann, Bob or Sally – is best at their job. To answer this question, he makes a mental list of their good and bad points and, on the basis of that, places them in an evaluative hierarchy – Sally is best because she is good at all aspects of the job, Bob is second best because he is excellent with customers, Ann comes third because she is always late for meetings. Unlike the tripartite model, McGuire’s definition does not assume that ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Series editor’s introduction
• Introduction
• Chapter 1 Attitudes
• Chapter 2 Attributions
• Chapter 3 Stereotypes, prejudice and racism
• Chapter 4 Social influence: persuasion
• Chapter 5 Social influence: conformity, compliance and group processes
• Chapter 6 Prosocial behaviour
• Chapter 7 Gender and social psychology
• Chapter 8 Close relationships
• Chapter 9 Methodologies
• Chapter 10 Keeping the social in social psychology: the importance of context
• Glossary
• References
• Index