Attitudes and Attitude Change

Tobias Vogel, Michaela Wanke

• Publisher: Psychology Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317623342
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Attitudes have been a central topic in social psychology from its early beginnings. But what exactly are attitudes, where do they come from, and how can they be modified? The overall aim of Attitudes and Attitude Change is to provide students with a comprehensive and accessible introduction to these basic issues in the psychological study of attitudes.

In four parts, readers learn about how attitudes can be measured, how attitudes are shaped in the course of life, how they are changed by other people, and finally, how attitudes in turn affect our thoughts and behavior. This completely revised and updated second edition covers many recent developments and reports cutting-edge research while also addressing the classic findings and theories that advanced the field. In addition to integrating the newly emerged topics of implicit attitudes and recent models regarding the coexistence of explicit and implicit attitudes, this edition also adds chapters on social influence and resistance to persuasion.

This comprehensive and user-friendly book carefully balances theoretical underpinnings and empirical findings with applied examples to enable readers to use the insights of attitude research for practical applications. Critical discussions also instigate readers to develop their own thinking on key topics.

Chapter 1
What is an Attitude and Why is it Important?

FIGURE 1.1 Attitudes

Note: We not only have attitudes, but we express them. They are a central part of individuality and identity. (Joseph Sohm/Shuttercock.com)

Throughout history, people have fought for freedom of belief, freedom of thought, and freedom of speech. Many examples can be found of people ready to die for their convictions. On the dark side, even today people kill, persecute and inflict suffering because of misguided attitudes based on nationalism, racism or religious fanaticism.

People love and hate, like and dislike, favour and oppose. They agree, disagree, argue, persuade and sometimes even convince each other. Every day, each of us is exposed to countless attempts to change or reinforce our attitudes via personal communication or the mass media. Every day, social scientists and market researchers conduct studies and polls. They report that about three-quarters of EU citizens are in favour of putting pictorial health warnings on cigarette packages (Special Eurobarometer 385, 2012), that more than 70 per cent of people are usually satisfied with their work (Furnham, 1997), that more Americans express that they like rather than dislike blacks (Associated Press, 2012), or that young singles living in urban areas value health aspects and gourmet appeal in convenience food. Such findings in turn provide input for political, organisational or marketing decisions. Moreover, when individual attitudes turn into public opinion, these attitudes determine the social, political and cultural climate in a society, which in turn affects the individual lives of the people in that society. In the 1950s, in an era of more conservative sexual attitudes, unmarried student couples would have faced a very different experience from today had they moved in together. Before the new millennium, homosexual couples were virtually non-existent on TV, because producers shied away from such ‘controversial’ issues. If you are not convinced yet that attitudes might be an important concept, we have more – and hopefully more convincing – arguments below.

In any case, you may come up with many questions. For example, you may wonder how one can possibly know the views of the average European regarding cigarette on-package warnings. How is it that people have different attitudes? How was it possible that attitudes towards homosexuals changed so dramatically within a relatively short period? Can one really influence attitudes, and if so, how? What are attitudes good for? Will a person who opposes animal testing also act upon her attitude and boycott products involving animal testing? Social psychology has a lot to say about such issues – in fact, much more than we can cover in this book. In our attempt to answer some of these questions we will first provide you with a more formal definition of what attitudes are.

What is an Attitude?

We have already provided some examples of attitudes. Sexism, liberalism, love for chocolate or the belief that the Rolling Stones are the greatest rock band ever represent other examples. As different as these are, they all represent an evaluative response towards an object – and this basic statement is a common denominator that emerges from many different definitions in the literature of attitudes. Accordingly, we define an attitude as ‘a summary evaluation of an object of thought’.

Attitude: Summary evaluation of an object of thought.

Attitude object: This can be anything a person discriminates or holds in mind – e.g. things, persons, groups or abstract ideas.

An attitude object can be anything a person discriminates or holds in mind. Attitude objects may be concrete (e.g. pizza) or abstract (e.g. freedom of speech). They may be inanimate things (e.g. sports cars), persons (e.g. your teacher, oneself) or groups (e.g. conservative politicians, foreigners). Attitudes can encompass affective, behavioural and cognitive responses, as summarized in the Tripartite model of attitudes (Allport, 1935). For example, an environmentalist might strongly believe that air pollution destroys the ozone layer, which increases the risk of cancer (cognitive); she might get angry or sad about the extinction of endangered species (affective); and she might use public transportation rather than a car, and participate in recycling (behavioural). Because it is difficult to separate the different classes of response from each other, and because it is not essential for all three classes to be represented, we have adopted a one-dimensional definition of attitude as a summary evaluation.

Tripartite model: The assumption that affective, cognitive and behavioural responses are independent elements of an attitude.

Our definition corresponds with the perspective taken by most attitude researchers (cf. Albarracín et al., 2005). One source of debate regarding attitude conceptualisations is whether evaluations have to be stable over a longer time period and have to be stored in the long-term memory to qualify as an attitude. Some definitions characterise attitudes as enduring concepts which are stored in the memory and can be retrieved accordingly (e.g. Allport, 1935; Eagly & Chaiken, 2007, for a classic and a more recent reference). This perspective was termed the ‘file-drawer model’ because it perceives attitudes as mental files which individuals consult for the evaluation of the object in question (Wilson et al., 1990). In contrast, other researchers have proposed that attitudes are temporary constructions; according to this attitudes-as-constructions perspective, people do not retrieve any previously stored attitude from memory, but instead generate an evaluative judgement at the time it is needed, based on the information that comes to mind in the situation (for reviews, see Schwarz & Bohner, 2001; Wilson & Hodges, 1992).

File-drawer model: A theoretical perspective that characterises attitudes as enduring concepts which are stored in the memory and retrieved when needed for object evaluation.

Attitudes-as-constructions perspective: A theoretical orientation positing that individuals construct evaluative judgements on the basis of chronically and temporally accessible information.

Both perspectives can draw upon supporting evidence. On one hand, some attitudes – for example, political attitudes (e.g. Marwell et al., 1987; Sears & Funk, 1999) – have been shown to be relatively stable over time. On the other hand, numerous studies have shown that people have different attitudes depending on the context – for example, when they experience different mood states (e.g. Schwarz & Clore, 1983), or when the situation brings different contents to mind (e.g. Tourangeau & Rasinski, 1988), or when faced with different interviewers (e.g. Schuman & Converse, 1971). We will extend this discussion in Chapter 6.

Although the defining variable of attitudes is valence, attitudes may differ in other respects too. Most prominently, attitudes differ regarding their strength (e.g. Abelson, 1988; Bassili, 2008; Petty & Krosnick, 1995). For instance, think of an attitude towards energy conservation in a lay-person and an expert. Both may hold a somewhat positive attitude towards renewable energies. However, the expert’s attitude will be based on much more information, and because the attitude is confronted more frequently, it will also spring to mind more quickly. Also, the expert might have a clearer conception about what his or her attitude is. As we will see later (Chapters 10 and 13), attitude strength is a meaningful construct that, if taken into account, enables more specific predictions than merely attitude valence (cf. Table 1.1).

Attitude strength: Reflects the intensity of an individual’s feelings or beliefs as manifested in attitude extremity, accessibility, certainty and other indicators.

TABLE 1.1 Indicators of attitude strength

Indicator of attitude strength	Key question
Accessibility	Upon encounter, how fast does the evaluation of an object come to your mind?
Ambivalence	Do you have both positive and negative thoughts or feelings about the object?
Certainty	Are you sure about how to evaluate the object, or do you have doubts?
Ego-involvement	Is the attitude an important part of your personality?
Extremity	Are you a big fan of the object or do you just like somewhat?
Issue-involvement	Is the topic important to you?
Knowledge base	Is your evaluation based on much knowledge about the object, or just a little?

Note: Summary evaluations of an object are not all alike, but may differ regarding their strength. The table lists some indicators summarised under the umbrella of attitude strength and the key questions to illustrate their meaning. Stronger attitudes are more accessible, extreme, held with higher certainty and less ambivalence. Note that the indicators are correlated, but constitute distinct, separable constructs (e.g. Pomerantz etal., 1995; Raden, 1985). For an illustration, consider different persons, a political scientist and a partisan, both holding strong attitudes towards communism. Both may have highly accessible attitudes held with great certainty. A partisan of the communist party, however, may hold a more extreme attitude and identify with communism (i.e. high ego-involvement). However, the political scientist may hold a less extreme attitude towards communism, but politics is considered an important issue (i.e. high issue-involvement) and there is substantial objective topic knowledge. Further indicators refer to the attitude formation process and an attitude’s consequences, and therefore will be dealt with later in this book

Accessibility: The ease with which information (e.g. an attitude) comes to mind.

A particular indicator of attitude strength that has received more attention lately is attitude accessibility. It has been proposed that some attitude objects are linked so strongly to an evaluation that the object activates the respective attitude ‘automatically’¹ – that is, without effortful or voluntary control (e.g. Fazio, 1990, 2007). Such automatic evaluations typically determine the initial response to an attitude object. However, conflicting thoughts, beliefs and attitudes may override the initial response. For example, your initial reaction to a piece of rich chocolate cake may be ‘yummy’ (positive), but when you think of the high fat and sugar content your overall evaluation will turn more negative. With such discrepant tendencies, the interesting question is which process – automatic or deliberative – will surface under which conditions and will affect the summary evaluation, as well as further information processing and behaviour. Given that such automatic responses may easily be overridden once deliberate reasoning kicks in, measuring the automatic evaluative responses has proved a challenge. With the advance of such measures (often referred to as implicit attitude measures), which we review in Chapter 3, attitude research entered a new era with the beginning of the millennium. The interplay of spontaneous responses and more deliberative processes in attitude change and implications for attitude-behaviour correspondence are addressed further in Chapters 6, 7 and 13.

Why do People have Attitudes?

Over the years social psychologists have suggested different classes of psychological needs or goals which may be served by holding attitudes. The assumption guiding initial thoughts and research was that in order to change a particular attitude, one needs to know which function it serves. Consequently, researchers who were concerned with prejudice focused on functions possibly underlying prejudice. Other researchers looked at functions relevant to consumer behaviour. Although each theoretical analysis needs to be understood within the specific context in which it evolved, most taxonomies overlap to some extent. We suggest here two main attitude functions that can be seen as the essence of different theoretical approaches:

• a) serving knowledge organisation and guiding approach and avoidance;
• b) serving higher psychological needs.

Attitude function: The purpose that holding an attitude serves for an individual.

Organisation of knowledge, and regulating approach and avoidance

Knowledge function: An attitude’s function of providing structure for organising and handling an otherwise complex and ambiguous environment.

Cognitive schema: A cognitive structure representing an individual’s knowl...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Prologue
• Chapter 1 What is an attitude and why is it important?
• PART I GATEWAYS TO OUR ATTITUDES
• PART II THE ORIGINS OF OUR ATTITUDES
• PART III THE SOCIAL NATURE OF ATTITUDE CHANGE
• PART IV CONSEQUENCES OF OUR ATTITUDES
• Epilogue
• Glossary
• References
• Author index
• Subject index