Attitudes and Opinions

Stuart Oskamp, P. Wesley Schultz

• Publisher: Psychology Press
• Year: 2005
• ISBN:
  9781135618605
• Edition: 3
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Consumer Behaviour
• Index: Business

Notable advances resulting from new research findings, measurement approaches, widespread uses of the Internet, and increasingly sophisticated approaches to sampling and polling, have stimulated a new generation of attitude scholars. This extensively revised edition captures this excitement, while remaining grounded in scholarly research. Attitudes and Opinions, 3/e maintains one of the main goals of the original edition--breadth of coverage. The book thoroughly reviews both implicit and explicit measures of attitudes, the structure and function of attitudes, the nature of public opinion and polling, attitude formation, communication of attitudes and opinions, and the relationship between attitudes and behaviors, as well as theories and research on attitude change. Over 2, 000 references support the book's scientific integrity. The authors' second goal is to demonstrate the relevance of the topic to people's lives. Subsequently, the second part of the book examines many of the topics and research findings that are salient in the world today--political and international attitudes (including terrorism), voting behavior, racism and prejudice, sexism and gender roles, and environmental attitudes. This thoroughly revised new edition features:
*an entirely new chapter on implicit measures attitudes;
*a new chapter on environmental attitudes;
*updated opinion poll data throughout the book;
*additional material on time trends in attitudes about many issues; and
*expanded, updated sections on international attitudes reflecting the events of 9/11 and the subsequent invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. Attitudes and Opinions' broad and interdisciplinary perspective makes this an ideal text in courses on attitudes, public opinion, survey research, or persuasion, taught in a variety of departments including psychology, communication, marketing, sociology, and political science.

I
Approaches to Studying Attitudes and Opinions

1
Background: History and Concepts

Attitude. It’s the current buzzword. It’s also one of the most important factors of success, according to more than 1,000 top- and middle-level executives of 13 major American corporations....Your attitude can make or break your career.

—Allan Cox, 1983.

What are laws but the expressions of the opinion of some class, which has power over the rest of the community? By what was the world ever governed but by the opinion of some person or persons? By what else can it ever be governed?

—Thomas B. Macaulay, 1830.

As these quotations illustrate, attitudes and opinions are important. They can help people, they can hurt people, they have influenced the course of history. Novelists and poets describe them, historians weigh and assess them, average citizens explain people’s behavior in terms of their attitudes, politicians attempt to understand and shape public opinion. Consequently social psychologists, too, have long had a great interest in attitudes and opinions and have devised many ways of studying them. This book describes these research methods, summarizes the important findings on major aspects of attitudes and opinions, and tries to clarify the many current theories and controversies in the field.

Why Study Attitudes?

One long-standing controversy has been whether to study attitudes or behavior. This debate goes back to the early years of social psychology, when it was just beginning to be differentiated from other areas of psychology and sociology. For instance, the wellknown sociologist Read Bain (1928, p. 940) wrote, “The development of sociology as a natural science has been hindered by...too much attention to subjective factors, such as . . . attitudes.” Behaviorists, following the lead of psychologists such as B. F. Skinner (1957), have generally tried to avoid use of “mentalistic concepts” like attitude, and to study observable behavior instead.

However, the majority view among social psychologists was best expressed in a landmark handbook chapter by Gordon Allport, one of the founders of the field (see Box 1–1). Writing in 1935, he stressed the central importance of attitudes:

The concept of attitude is probably the most distinctive and indispensable concept in contemporary American social psychology. . . . This useful, one might almost say peaceful, concept has been so widely adopted that it has virtually established itself as the keystone in the edifice of American social psychology. (p. 798)

Box 1–1 Gordon Allport, Champion of Attitudes

Photograph courtesy of Harvard University News Office. Reprinted by permission.

Gordon Allport (1897–1967) was one of the most famous and beloved social psychologists of his day. He received his B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. from Harvard and taught there continuously from 1930 until his death. He served as chairman of Harvard’s psychology department, president of the American Psychological Association, editor of the major journal in social psychology for 12 years, and was a member of numerous national and international committees.

Allport’s interests within social psychology were broad. He wrote several major textbooks on personality, as well as The Psychology of Rumor, The Nature of Prejudice, The Psychology of Radio, books on religion, expressive movement, and research methods, and also over 200 articles. An authority on attitudes, he wrote classic chapters covering that topic in three successive editions of the Handbook of Social Psychology (1935, 1954, 1968), and his final chapter was reprinted in the 1985 Handbook.

Although there have been some periods since then when research in other areas of social psychology, such as small-group dynamics, has somewhat overshadowed the amount of work on attitudes, by and large the study of attitudes and related topics has remained dominant (McGuire, 1985). In their research review, Petty and Wegener (1998) declared, “Although it has become cliche to say that the attitude construct is the most indispensable construct in contemporary social psychology, this statement appears as true today as when G. W. Allport (1935) initially wrote it” (p. 323). Other reviews of the field agree that the high interest in attitude research seems likely to continue in the foreseeable future (Tesser & Shaffer, 1990; Eagly & Chaiken, 1993, 1998; Olson & Zanna, 1993; Petty, Wegener, & Fabrigar, 1997; Ajzen, 2001).

The word attitude is widely used in everyday speech to describe a person or explain behavior; for instance, “She has a very good attitude toward her work.” People often speak of someone’s attitude as the cause of his or her actions toward another person or an object; for example, “Her hostile attitude was shown in everything she did.” Similarly, in his 1935 review, Allport concluded that the concept of attitudes was “bearing most of the descriptive and explanatory burdens of social psychology” (p. 804).

Why is attitude such a popular and useful concept‘? We can point to several reasons:

1. “Attitude” is a shorthand term. A single attitude (e.g., love for one’s family) can summarize many different behaviors (spending time with them, kissing them, comforting them, agreeing with them, doing things for them).

2. An attitude can be considered the cause of a person’s behavior toward another person or an object.

3. The concept of attitude helps to explain the consistency of a person’s behavior, for a single attitude may underlie many different actions. (In turn, Allport said, the consistency of individual behavior helps to explain the stability of society.)

4. Attitudes are important in their own right, regardless of their relation to a person’s behavior. Your attitudes toward various individuals, institutions, and social issues (e.g., a political party, the church, capital punishment, the President of the United States) reflect the way you perceive the world around you, and they are worth studying for their own sake.

5. The concept of attitude is relatively neutral and acceptable to many theoretical schools of thought. For instance, it bridges the controversy between heredity and environment, for both instinct and learning can be involved in the formation of attitudes. It is broad enough to include the operation of unconscious determinants and the dynamic interplay of conflicting motives, which have been stressed by Freud and other psychoanalysts. At the same time it provides a topic of common interest to theorists as diverse as phenomenologists, behaviorists, and cognitive psychologists.

6. Attitude is an interdisciplinary concept. Not just psychologists but also sociologists, political scientists, communication researchers, and anthropologists all study attitudes. In particular, the subarea of public opinion—the shared attitudes of many members of a society—is of great interest to students of politics, public affairs, and communication.

Five Ways of Studying Attitudes

Given the usefulness of the term attitudes, it is not surprising that it has attracted a great deal of research attention. Five different ways of studying attitudes and opinions have typified most of the research studies in the area. Surprisingly, there has been very little overlap or interaction between the adherents of these five approaches, so that in most cases their work has been carried on with little cross-fertilization from the methods or findings of the other groups of researchers. The five different approaches are as follows:

Description. Attitude describers typically study the views held by a single interesting group of people (for instance, recent immigrants, or state legislators). Or they may compare the opinions of two or more groups (for example, the attitudes of white-collar workers versus those of blue-collar workers on the topic of labor unions). To some extent they may overlap with the next two groups of researchers (the measurers and the pollers), but the describers are usually less concerned with sophisticated quantification than are the measurers and less concerned with representative sampling than are the pollers. They are also less interested in understanding and explaining the underlying bases for attitudes than are the theorists and experimenters.

Measurement. Attitude measurers have developed many highly sophisticated methods for quantifying and scaling attitudes. The best-known methods of building attitude scales are discussed in Chapter 3. It is surprising, but true, that public opinion pollers and attitude experimenters have made very little use of these sophisticated measurement methods, and attitude describers have made only a little more use of them.

Polls. Public opinion pollers are generally concerned with the attitudes on important social issues held by very large groups of people (for instance, the voting intentions of all registered voters of a state, or the opinions about crime and punishment held by adult citizens). The procedures and problems of public opinion polling are discussed inChapter 6. At their best, polls are careful to sample systematically or randomly (rather than haphazardly) from the total population so that their results will be representative of the opinions of the total population.

Theories. Attitude theorists are primarily concerned with explaining the basic nature of attitudes, how attitudes are formed, and how they can be changed. In most cases they have not been concerned with the precise measurement of attitudes nor with their content, socially important or not. However, because they need to demonstrate the correctness of their theories through experimental evidence, there has been more overlap and interaction between the theorists and the experimenters than between any of the other groups. Chapters 10 and 11 discuss both theories and research on attitude change.

Experiments. By definition, experiments involve manipulating a situation so as to create two or more different levels of the independent variable (for instance, two different kinds of persuasive message) and observing their effect on the dependent variable. Attitude experimenters have concentrated on investigating the factors that can produce attitude change and on testing the hypotheses of the attitude theorists. They have usually been relatively unconcerned with sophisticated measurement methods, and they generally choose to experiment on attitude topics of little importance or relevance to their subjects, for such attitudes can more easily be changed in a short-term laboratory situation. However, there have also been a number of experiments done on topics of greater social importance, such as basic personal values, racial attitudes, or health-care practices.

Themes of This Book

There are a number of general themes that recur throughout this book and help to organize the information in the various content areas. The major ones are these:

• Social cognitive processes. Social cognition refers to our thought processes about people and social situations. It includes the ways we gather social information, organize it, and interpret it. Thus social cognition processes are important in determining the way our attitudes and opinions are formed, strengthened, and changed over the course of time.
• Functions of attitudes and opinions. Our attitudes and opinions are useful to us. They are convenient aids to our thinking, decision-making, and actions in innumerable social situations. They summarize and organize our thoughts and reactions to other people, situations, objects, and ideas.
• Attitude measurement and research methods. Many specialized ways of measuring attitudes and opinions have been developed, and distinctive research methods have also been established, particularly in the areas of survey research and attitude change.
• Different types of attitudes. Explicitly stated attitudes have been the type most often studied. However, in recent years, much research has been focused on implicit attitudes, which can be inferred from individuals' response times or physiological responses when they are presented with crucial stimuli.
• Attitude formation and transmission. The processes by which attitudes and opinions are formed are important topics in many sections of this volume, as are the ways that attitudes and opinions are communicated, both through the mass media and through personal communication.
• Persuasion and attitude change. This is one of the areas most heavily studied by social psychologists, so portions of the immense research literature are discussed at many points in the text.
• Attitude-behavior relationships. As mentioned earlier, the choice of attitudes versus behavior as a major focus of study has long been a controversy in social psychology, and the question of how closely people's attitudes and behavior are related is a key issue in the field—one that is crucial in attempts to predict, understand, or change people's behavior.
• Social impact and policy implications of attitudes and opinions. This theme shows up at many points, in discussions of the structure of public opinion and of how (if at all) public opinion influences public policy or is influenced by it.

Definitions of "Attitude"

So far we have been using the term “attitude” without defining it. Because it is a common term in the English language, every reader will probably have a notion of its meaning. Unfortunately, however, there may be relatively little overlap between your notion and that of other readers. Indeed, there has sometimes been little overlap between the definitions of attitude suggested by different social scientists.

At the outset, we must emphasize that scientific usage of the term attitude is different from some current colloquial or slang meanings of the word. Social scientists would agree that everyone has many attitudes, on many different topics. Therefore, they do not use the phrase “having an attitude” with the current slang meaning of being pugnacious or sullenly deviant. Nor do they use the term to refer to broader personality characteristics, such as those implied in the colloquial phrase “a bad attitude” (Eagly & Chaiken, 1993, p. 9).

Originally the term “attitude” referred to a person’s bodily position or posture, and it is still sometimes used in this way—for instance, “He sat slumped in an attitude of dejection.” There is a marvelous example in Gilbert and Sullivan’s operetta H.M.S. Pinafore, in which the proper stance for a British tar is described (Gilbert, 1932, p. 31—see Figure 1–1):

His foot should stamp and his throat should growl,
His hair should twirl and his face should scowl;
His eyes should flash and his breast protrude,
And this should be his customary attitude.

FIGURE 1–1 A British tar.

Box 1–2 Sample Definitions of "Attitude"

COMPREHENSIVE—An attitude is a mental or neural state of readiness, organized through experience, exerting a directive or dynamic influence upon the individual’s response to all objects and situations with which it is related. (G. Allport, 1935, p. 810)

SIMPLE—Attitudes are likes and dislikes. (Bem, 1970, p. 14)

EMPHASIS ON EVALUATION—Attitude is a psychological tendency that is expressed by evaluating a particular entity with some degree of favor or disfavor. (Eagly & Chaiken, 1993, p. 1)

EMPHASIS ON LEARNING AND CONSISTENCY—An attitude is a learned predisposition to respond in a consistently favorable or unfavorable manner with respect to a given object. (Fishbein & Ajzen, 1975, p. 6)

In social science, however, the term has come to mean a “posture of the mind,” rather than of the body. In his careful review, Allport (1935) cited many definitions with varying emphases and concluded with a comprehensive definition of his own. The aspects stressed in various early definitions include attitude as a mental set or disposition, attitude as a readine...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Half Title
• I Approaches to Studying Attitudes and Opinions
• II Public Opinion on Socially Important Topics
• References
• Name Index
• Subject Index