Summary Psychology 324 EXAM Rebecca JvR (19980329)
Week 4:
Textbook chapter 5: Attitudes
Structure and function of attitudes - A short history of attitudes o Allport referred to attitude as social
psychology’s most indispensable concept. Others had defined social psychology as the scientific
study of attitudes. The early 1930s saw the first generation of questionnaire-based scales to
measure attitudes.
o Attitude = a mental and neural state of readiness, organised through experience,
exerting a directive or dynamic influence upon the individual’s response to all objects
and situations with which it is related (Allport).
o This fashionable concept became the centre of much controversy in the decades
following. Three main phases were identified by McGuire:
▪ A concentration on attitude measurement and how these measurements
related to behaviour 1920s and 1930s)
▪ A focus on the dynamics of change in an individual’s attitudes (1950s and
1960s)
▪ A focus on the cognitive and social structure and function of attitudes and
attitude systems (1980s and 1990s)
o Attitude derived from the Latin aptus (fit and ready for action). This refers to
something directly observable. Today, attitude researchers view attitude as a
construct that is not directly observable, but precedes behaviour and guides choices
and decisions for action.
o Attitude research has always been very popular, but entered a period of decline in the
1960s and 1970s (concern about apparent lack of relationship between expressed
attitudes and overt behaviour).
o The 1980s brought Attitudes back to the centre of attention, stimulated by the impact
of cognitive psychology on social psychology. Focus was placed on how information
processing and memory, and affect and feelings might affect attitude formation and
change. There has been a focus recently on biochemical dimensions of attitude
phenomena and neural activity associated with attitudes.
o Attitudes are basic and pervasive. Without them, people would have difficulty in
constructing and reacting to events, making decisions, and making sense of their
relationships.
- Attitude structure o One component
▪ (Thurstone) – An attitude is the affect for or against a
psychological object. Or, a degree of positive or negative affect associated
with some psychological object. o Two component
▪ (Allport) – He added a state of mental readiness as a second
component. Mental readiness is a predisposition which has a relatively
consistent influence on how we decide what is good or bad or desirable or
undesirable. An attitude is therefore a private event (unobservable externally
and only inferred). o Three component
▪ Particularly popular in the 1960s. McGuire – attitude is
composed of thought, feeling and action. Also referred to as a relatively
enduring organisation of beliefs about, and feelings and behavioural
tendencies towards socially significant objects, groups, events or symbols.
This emphasises that attitudes are:
• Relatively permanent (persist across time and situation)
Page 1 of 99
,Summary 2021 Psychology 324 EXAM Rebecca JvR (19980329)
▪
• Limited to social significant events or objects
• Generalisable (to some degree)
Each attitude is then made up of thoughts and ideas, a cluster of feelings, likes
and dislikes, and behavioural intentions.
▪ This model presents a problem by prejudging a link between attitude and
behaviour. Most modern definitions of attitude involve brief and feeling
structures and are concerned with how (if each can be measured) the data
may help predict people’s actions.
- Attitude functions o Presumably attitudes exist because they are useful – they have a purpose.
Katz proposed that there are various kinds of attitude, each serving a different function, such
as:
▪ Knowledge, Instrumentality (means to an end or goal), Ego defense (protecting
self-esteem), value expressiveness (expressing unique values).
o It saves cognitive energy, so we don’t have to figure out how we should relate to an
object or situation from scratch every time. It fits the cognitive miser or motivated
tactician models.
o Fazio argued that the main function is a utilitarian one (object appraisal). This should
hold regardless of positive or negative valence. Having an attitude is useful because
of the orientation towards the object it provides. For an attitude to truly fulfil its
function it must be accessible.
- Cognitive consistency o In late 1950s and 1960s cognitive consistency theories dominated,
and their emphasis on cognition dealt a fatal blow to simplistic reinforcement explanations.
The best known theory is cognitive dissonance theory. o This family of theories specified that
beliefs are the building blocks of attitude structure, and focused on inconsistencies in peoples
beliefs. They differ in how they define consistency and inconsistency, but all assume that
people find inconsistent beliefs aversive. Thoughts are inconsistent if they seem to contradict
each other – called dissonance. The theories argue that people are motivated to change one
or more contradictory beliefs so that the belief system is in harmony and consistency is
restored.
o Balance theory
▪ Heider’s theory has the clearest implications for attitude structure. His ideas
were grounded in Gestalt psychology – Belief that the human mind is a
person’s cognitive field and it comprises interacting forces that are associated
with people’s perceptions of people, objects and events.
▪ Balance theory focuses on the P-O-X unit of the individual’s cognitive field.
Imagine a triad of 3 elements: A person (P), another person (O) and an
attitude, object or topic. A triad is inconsistent if balanced (assessed by
counting the number and type of relationships between the elements. (E.g. P
likes X (positive relationship), and O disliking X (negative relationship), and P
disliking O (negative relationship)).
▪ There are 8 possible combinations of relationships, 4 are balanced and 4 are
unbalanced. A triad is balanced if there is an odd number of positive
relationships. (E.g. if P likes O, O likes X and P likes X then it is balanced. If P
likes X then any compatible other (O) should feel the same way.) Unbalanced
triads have an even number of positive relationships. The principle of
Page 2 of 99
,Summary Psychology 324 EXAM Rebecca JvR (19980329)
consistency that underlies balance theory means that in unbalanced triads
people may feel tense and be motivated to restore balance. This is generally
accomplished in a manner requiring the least effort.
▪ Unbalanced structures are usually less stable and more unpleasant than
balanced structures. In the absence of contradictory information, people
assume that others will like what they like. We often prefer to agree with
someone else. People do not always seek to resolve inconsistency. Sometimes
they organise their beliefs to that elements are kept isolated and resistant to
change. Research on balance theory has been extensive and mostly
supportive.
- Cognition and evaluation o The one-component theory of affect at the core was the initially
popular theory. Then, evaluation as the core component became popular. This simple idea
resurfaces more complicatedly in the socio-cognitive model (Pratkanis and Greenwald) – an
attitude is defined as a person’s evaluation of an object of thought. An attitude object is
represented in memory by:
▪ An object label and the rules for applying that label, an evaluative summary of
that object, and a knowledge structure supporting that evaluation.
o E.g. the attitude object we know as ‘shark’ may be represented in memory as a really
big fish with very sharp teeth (label), that lives in the sea and eats other fish and
sometimes people (rules), is scary and best avoided while swimming (evaluative
summary), and is a scientifically and fictionally well-documented threat to our physical
well-being (knowledge structure). Despite cognitive emphasis, it was the evaluative
component that they highlighted. o The evaluative dimension of attitudes is a central
focus of research on prejudice where the key problem is that members of one group
harbour negative attitudes towards members of another group. Various terms have
been used almost interchangeably in denoting this evaluative component (affect /
evaluation / emotion / feeling) suggesting a need for terminology to be tidied and
standardised.
o Recent research on affect and emotion has sorted some of this out by theorising about
role of cognitive appraisal of stimuli in people’s experience of affect and emotion.
When we apply this to the study of attitude, we can distinguish between affect (an
emotional reaction to an attitude object) and evaluation (particular kinds of thought,
belief and judgement about the object).
- Decision making and attitudes o Do we perform cognitive algebra?
▪ Information processing approaches emphasise how complex it is to acquire
knowledge and to form and change our attitudes. According to information
integration theory, we use cognitive algebra to construct our attitudes from
information we received about attitude objects. People are sophisticated
problem solvers and vigilant evaluators of new information. How we receive
and combine this information provides the basis for attitude structure. The
salience of some items and the order they are received become important
determinants of the way in which they are processed. As new information
arrives, people evaluate it and combine it with existing information stored in
memory.
▪ In Anderson’s approach, we acquire and re-evaluate attitudes by using
cognitive algebra. We average out the values attaches to discrete bits of
information that are collated and stored in memory about an attitude object.
(Information integration theory)
o Attitudes and automatic judgements
Page 3 of 99
, Summary 2021 Psychology 324 EXAM Rebecca JvR (19980329)
▪
▪ Devine challenged classical attitude theory, suggesting that people’s attitudes
are underpinned by implicit and automatic judgements they are unaware of.
These are automatic and unconscious, so they are less influenced by social
desirability bias. So, they should be a more reliable measure of a person’s true
attitudes.
Schwarz says: a model of attitude as an implicit construct could help us better
understand the relationship between people’s attitudes and their behaviour.
Other scholars are more cautious (implicit and explicit measures may depend
on context in different ways, there is only weak correlations. Van der Pligt and
de Vries proposed a decision-making strategy continuum, which ranges from
intuition to controlled information processing.
▪ Dispute over the best way to characterise attitudes seems to continue. Is it a
directive and organised state of readiness (Allport), an outcome of algebraic
communication (Anderson) or an automatic judgement (Devine)?
Can attitudes predict behaviour?
Why study attitudes if there is disagreement on how best to define them? Attitudes are thought of as
useful for predicting behaviour. Some behavioural scientists have questioned that assumption.
Gregson & Stacey – Only small positive correlation between attitudes and self-reported alcohol
consumption. No evidence of any benefits in focusing on attitude change over economic incentives to
control alcohol use. This has caused some critics to question the utility of the concept of attitudes. An
early study of ethnic attitudes by LaPiere revealed a glaring inconsistency between what people do
and say. Following this, researchers have used more sophisticated methods to study the
attitudebehaviour relationship, but still mainly found low correspondence between questionnaire
measures and actual behaviour measures. Wicker then concluded that the correlation is seldom as
high as 0.30 (9% of the variability), and that the average correlation is actually only 0.15 – very little
predictive power. A sense of despair settled on the field, but attitudes are still being researched.
What gradually emerged is that attitudes and overt behaviour are not related in a one-to-one fashion.
Conditions promote or disrupt the correspondence. E.g. Attitude-behaviour consistency can vary
according to whether an attitude is more or less accessible / an attitude is expressed publicly or
privately / an individual identifies strongly or weakly with a group for which the attitude is normative.
Not all social behaviour can be predicted accurately from verbally expressed attitudes. We look now
at research that has explored why correspondence is often weak and what factors may strengthen it.
- Beliefs, intentions and behaviour o Fishbein – the basic ingredient of an attitude is affect, but
an attitude measure based entirely on a unidimensional, bipolar evaluative scale does not
predict reliably how a person will later behave. Better prediction depends on an account of
the interaction between attitudes, beliefs and behavioural intentions; and the connections of
all of these with subsequent actions.
o We need to establish how strong and how valuable a person’s beliefs are. Some will
carry more weight in relation to the final act. Without this information, trying to
predict an outcome for a given individual must inevitably be a hit-or-miss affair. o
Belief strength (or expectancy) has a probability estimate (0 to 1) regarding the truth.
Evaluation (or value) can be positive or negative. Belief strength and evaluation
interact, producing a final rating (this view incorporates the idea that people perform
cognitive algebra).
o This approach to prediction also offers a method of measurement, the
expectancyvalue technique. Fishbein (and Ajzen) developed the theory of reasoned
Page 4 of 99
Week 4:
Textbook chapter 5: Attitudes
Structure and function of attitudes - A short history of attitudes o Allport referred to attitude as social
psychology’s most indispensable concept. Others had defined social psychology as the scientific
study of attitudes. The early 1930s saw the first generation of questionnaire-based scales to
measure attitudes.
o Attitude = a mental and neural state of readiness, organised through experience,
exerting a directive or dynamic influence upon the individual’s response to all objects
and situations with which it is related (Allport).
o This fashionable concept became the centre of much controversy in the decades
following. Three main phases were identified by McGuire:
▪ A concentration on attitude measurement and how these measurements
related to behaviour 1920s and 1930s)
▪ A focus on the dynamics of change in an individual’s attitudes (1950s and
1960s)
▪ A focus on the cognitive and social structure and function of attitudes and
attitude systems (1980s and 1990s)
o Attitude derived from the Latin aptus (fit and ready for action). This refers to
something directly observable. Today, attitude researchers view attitude as a
construct that is not directly observable, but precedes behaviour and guides choices
and decisions for action.
o Attitude research has always been very popular, but entered a period of decline in the
1960s and 1970s (concern about apparent lack of relationship between expressed
attitudes and overt behaviour).
o The 1980s brought Attitudes back to the centre of attention, stimulated by the impact
of cognitive psychology on social psychology. Focus was placed on how information
processing and memory, and affect and feelings might affect attitude formation and
change. There has been a focus recently on biochemical dimensions of attitude
phenomena and neural activity associated with attitudes.
o Attitudes are basic and pervasive. Without them, people would have difficulty in
constructing and reacting to events, making decisions, and making sense of their
relationships.
- Attitude structure o One component
▪ (Thurstone) – An attitude is the affect for or against a
psychological object. Or, a degree of positive or negative affect associated
with some psychological object. o Two component
▪ (Allport) – He added a state of mental readiness as a second
component. Mental readiness is a predisposition which has a relatively
consistent influence on how we decide what is good or bad or desirable or
undesirable. An attitude is therefore a private event (unobservable externally
and only inferred). o Three component
▪ Particularly popular in the 1960s. McGuire – attitude is
composed of thought, feeling and action. Also referred to as a relatively
enduring organisation of beliefs about, and feelings and behavioural
tendencies towards socially significant objects, groups, events or symbols.
This emphasises that attitudes are:
• Relatively permanent (persist across time and situation)
Page 1 of 99
,Summary 2021 Psychology 324 EXAM Rebecca JvR (19980329)
▪
• Limited to social significant events or objects
• Generalisable (to some degree)
Each attitude is then made up of thoughts and ideas, a cluster of feelings, likes
and dislikes, and behavioural intentions.
▪ This model presents a problem by prejudging a link between attitude and
behaviour. Most modern definitions of attitude involve brief and feeling
structures and are concerned with how (if each can be measured) the data
may help predict people’s actions.
- Attitude functions o Presumably attitudes exist because they are useful – they have a purpose.
Katz proposed that there are various kinds of attitude, each serving a different function, such
as:
▪ Knowledge, Instrumentality (means to an end or goal), Ego defense (protecting
self-esteem), value expressiveness (expressing unique values).
o It saves cognitive energy, so we don’t have to figure out how we should relate to an
object or situation from scratch every time. It fits the cognitive miser or motivated
tactician models.
o Fazio argued that the main function is a utilitarian one (object appraisal). This should
hold regardless of positive or negative valence. Having an attitude is useful because
of the orientation towards the object it provides. For an attitude to truly fulfil its
function it must be accessible.
- Cognitive consistency o In late 1950s and 1960s cognitive consistency theories dominated,
and their emphasis on cognition dealt a fatal blow to simplistic reinforcement explanations.
The best known theory is cognitive dissonance theory. o This family of theories specified that
beliefs are the building blocks of attitude structure, and focused on inconsistencies in peoples
beliefs. They differ in how they define consistency and inconsistency, but all assume that
people find inconsistent beliefs aversive. Thoughts are inconsistent if they seem to contradict
each other – called dissonance. The theories argue that people are motivated to change one
or more contradictory beliefs so that the belief system is in harmony and consistency is
restored.
o Balance theory
▪ Heider’s theory has the clearest implications for attitude structure. His ideas
were grounded in Gestalt psychology – Belief that the human mind is a
person’s cognitive field and it comprises interacting forces that are associated
with people’s perceptions of people, objects and events.
▪ Balance theory focuses on the P-O-X unit of the individual’s cognitive field.
Imagine a triad of 3 elements: A person (P), another person (O) and an
attitude, object or topic. A triad is inconsistent if balanced (assessed by
counting the number and type of relationships between the elements. (E.g. P
likes X (positive relationship), and O disliking X (negative relationship), and P
disliking O (negative relationship)).
▪ There are 8 possible combinations of relationships, 4 are balanced and 4 are
unbalanced. A triad is balanced if there is an odd number of positive
relationships. (E.g. if P likes O, O likes X and P likes X then it is balanced. If P
likes X then any compatible other (O) should feel the same way.) Unbalanced
triads have an even number of positive relationships. The principle of
Page 2 of 99
,Summary Psychology 324 EXAM Rebecca JvR (19980329)
consistency that underlies balance theory means that in unbalanced triads
people may feel tense and be motivated to restore balance. This is generally
accomplished in a manner requiring the least effort.
▪ Unbalanced structures are usually less stable and more unpleasant than
balanced structures. In the absence of contradictory information, people
assume that others will like what they like. We often prefer to agree with
someone else. People do not always seek to resolve inconsistency. Sometimes
they organise their beliefs to that elements are kept isolated and resistant to
change. Research on balance theory has been extensive and mostly
supportive.
- Cognition and evaluation o The one-component theory of affect at the core was the initially
popular theory. Then, evaluation as the core component became popular. This simple idea
resurfaces more complicatedly in the socio-cognitive model (Pratkanis and Greenwald) – an
attitude is defined as a person’s evaluation of an object of thought. An attitude object is
represented in memory by:
▪ An object label and the rules for applying that label, an evaluative summary of
that object, and a knowledge structure supporting that evaluation.
o E.g. the attitude object we know as ‘shark’ may be represented in memory as a really
big fish with very sharp teeth (label), that lives in the sea and eats other fish and
sometimes people (rules), is scary and best avoided while swimming (evaluative
summary), and is a scientifically and fictionally well-documented threat to our physical
well-being (knowledge structure). Despite cognitive emphasis, it was the evaluative
component that they highlighted. o The evaluative dimension of attitudes is a central
focus of research on prejudice where the key problem is that members of one group
harbour negative attitudes towards members of another group. Various terms have
been used almost interchangeably in denoting this evaluative component (affect /
evaluation / emotion / feeling) suggesting a need for terminology to be tidied and
standardised.
o Recent research on affect and emotion has sorted some of this out by theorising about
role of cognitive appraisal of stimuli in people’s experience of affect and emotion.
When we apply this to the study of attitude, we can distinguish between affect (an
emotional reaction to an attitude object) and evaluation (particular kinds of thought,
belief and judgement about the object).
- Decision making and attitudes o Do we perform cognitive algebra?
▪ Information processing approaches emphasise how complex it is to acquire
knowledge and to form and change our attitudes. According to information
integration theory, we use cognitive algebra to construct our attitudes from
information we received about attitude objects. People are sophisticated
problem solvers and vigilant evaluators of new information. How we receive
and combine this information provides the basis for attitude structure. The
salience of some items and the order they are received become important
determinants of the way in which they are processed. As new information
arrives, people evaluate it and combine it with existing information stored in
memory.
▪ In Anderson’s approach, we acquire and re-evaluate attitudes by using
cognitive algebra. We average out the values attaches to discrete bits of
information that are collated and stored in memory about an attitude object.
(Information integration theory)
o Attitudes and automatic judgements
Page 3 of 99
, Summary 2021 Psychology 324 EXAM Rebecca JvR (19980329)
▪
▪ Devine challenged classical attitude theory, suggesting that people’s attitudes
are underpinned by implicit and automatic judgements they are unaware of.
These are automatic and unconscious, so they are less influenced by social
desirability bias. So, they should be a more reliable measure of a person’s true
attitudes.
Schwarz says: a model of attitude as an implicit construct could help us better
understand the relationship between people’s attitudes and their behaviour.
Other scholars are more cautious (implicit and explicit measures may depend
on context in different ways, there is only weak correlations. Van der Pligt and
de Vries proposed a decision-making strategy continuum, which ranges from
intuition to controlled information processing.
▪ Dispute over the best way to characterise attitudes seems to continue. Is it a
directive and organised state of readiness (Allport), an outcome of algebraic
communication (Anderson) or an automatic judgement (Devine)?
Can attitudes predict behaviour?
Why study attitudes if there is disagreement on how best to define them? Attitudes are thought of as
useful for predicting behaviour. Some behavioural scientists have questioned that assumption.
Gregson & Stacey – Only small positive correlation between attitudes and self-reported alcohol
consumption. No evidence of any benefits in focusing on attitude change over economic incentives to
control alcohol use. This has caused some critics to question the utility of the concept of attitudes. An
early study of ethnic attitudes by LaPiere revealed a glaring inconsistency between what people do
and say. Following this, researchers have used more sophisticated methods to study the
attitudebehaviour relationship, but still mainly found low correspondence between questionnaire
measures and actual behaviour measures. Wicker then concluded that the correlation is seldom as
high as 0.30 (9% of the variability), and that the average correlation is actually only 0.15 – very little
predictive power. A sense of despair settled on the field, but attitudes are still being researched.
What gradually emerged is that attitudes and overt behaviour are not related in a one-to-one fashion.
Conditions promote or disrupt the correspondence. E.g. Attitude-behaviour consistency can vary
according to whether an attitude is more or less accessible / an attitude is expressed publicly or
privately / an individual identifies strongly or weakly with a group for which the attitude is normative.
Not all social behaviour can be predicted accurately from verbally expressed attitudes. We look now
at research that has explored why correspondence is often weak and what factors may strengthen it.
- Beliefs, intentions and behaviour o Fishbein – the basic ingredient of an attitude is affect, but
an attitude measure based entirely on a unidimensional, bipolar evaluative scale does not
predict reliably how a person will later behave. Better prediction depends on an account of
the interaction between attitudes, beliefs and behavioural intentions; and the connections of
all of these with subsequent actions.
o We need to establish how strong and how valuable a person’s beliefs are. Some will
carry more weight in relation to the final act. Without this information, trying to
predict an outcome for a given individual must inevitably be a hit-or-miss affair. o
Belief strength (or expectancy) has a probability estimate (0 to 1) regarding the truth.
Evaluation (or value) can be positive or negative. Belief strength and evaluation
interact, producing a final rating (this view incorporates the idea that people perform
cognitive algebra).
o This approach to prediction also offers a method of measurement, the
expectancyvalue technique. Fishbein (and Ajzen) developed the theory of reasoned
Page 4 of 99
