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Full download (eTextbook PDF) for The Psychology of Attitudes and Attitude Change 2nd Edition file pdf all chapter on 2024
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CONTENTS
Glossary
References
Author index
Subject index
LIST OF FIGURES AND TABLES
FIGURES
1.1 An example of a Likert scale to assess attitudes toward euthanasia
1.2 A semantic differential measure of attitudes
1.3 A sample procedure sequence for a five-block IAT
2.1 The Multicomponent Model of Attitude
2.2 Open-ended measures of attitudinal components
2.3 Unidimensional and bidimensional views of attitude structure
3.1 Number of articles read, and time spent looking at articles, as a
function of article congruency (Knobloch-Westerwick & Meng, 2009)
3.2 An illustration of the way in which Roskos-Ewoldsen and Fazio (1992)
presented attitude objects
3.3 Is it a B or a 13? It depends on what you want to see (Balcetis &
Dunning, 2006)
3.4 Attitudes predicting subsequent behavior and behavior predicting
subsequent attitudes (Holland et al., 2002)
4.1 The Theory of Reasoned Action
4.2 The Theory of Planned Behavior
4.3 The MODE Model
4.4 The Composite Model of Attitude–Behavior Relations
5.1 Effects of Personal Relevance, Argument Strength, and Source
Expertise on Attitudes (Petty et al., 1981)
5.2 The Meta-Cognitive Model’s predictions for responses after receiving
novel negative information about an attitude object
6.1 The effects of differential exposure on liking toward a female
confederate (Moreland & Beach, 1992)
6.2 Two-Factor Model of Exposure Effects (Berlyne, 1970)
6.3 The effects of negative and positive primes on evaluations of an
unfamiliar target (Krosnick et al., 1992)
6.4 The effects of argument strength, affect, and attribution on evaluations
(Sinclair et al., 1994)
7.1 Attitudes toward the environment as a function of framing of past
behavior and pre-experimental strength of attitudes toward the
environment (Chaiken & Baldwin, 1981)
7.2 Kilograms lost by participants as a function of effort justification
(Axsom & Cooper, 1985)
7.3 Attitudes toward banning an inflammatory speaker after arguing in
favor of a ban (Zanna & Cooper, 1974): effects of (a) prior choice in
the counter-attitudinal advocacy and (b) the expected effect of a pill
7.4 A participant’s hypothetical responses to the latitudes measure used by
Fazio et al. (1977)
8.1 The effects of caffeine consumption and self-affirmation on persuasion
(Sherman et al., 2000)
8.2 The effects of affective versus cognitive frame and gender in attitudes
(Mayer & Tormala, 2010)
8.3 The effects of thirst/non-thirst and prime on intentions to drink Lipton
Ice (Karremans et al., 2006)
8.4 The effects of a trust prime on evaluations of a persuasive message
(Légal et al., 2011)
9.1 The effects of a prejudice intervention on IAT D-scores (Devine et al.,
2012).
9.2 The effects of leaning left or right on attitudes toward the American
Democrat and Republican parties (Oppenheimer & Trail, 2010)
9.3 Amount of attitude change as a function of caffeine consumption and
argument quality (P.Y. Martin et al., 2005)
9.4 A depiction of the life-stages hypothesis on the relation between age
and susceptibility to attitude change
10.1 Diagram of an attitude triad involving a person (P), an attitude object
(AO), and another person (OP)
10.2 Effects of experienced power and message strength on post-message
attitudes when power is manipulated before (top panel) and after
(bottom panel) the message (Briñol et al., 2007)
10.3 Effects of outcome relevance, majority versus minority source, and
argument strength on persuasion (Martin, Hewstone, & Martin, 2007)
10.4 Effects of culture and nature of prior feedback on change to a more
favorable evaluation of chosen CDs (Heine & Lehman, 1997)
11.1 Three different views of attitude representations (Breckler, 2004)
11.2 Effects of friendship with gay men on anxiety toward gay men,
attitudes toward them, and the accessibility and strength of these
attitudes (Vonofakou et al., 2007)
TABLES
5.1 Postulates of the Elaboration Likelihood Model
5.2 Key Assumptions of the Heuristic-Systematic Model
11.1 Murray’s (1938) 20 Psychological Needs
PREFACE
OVERVIEW
It is difficult to listen to a talk show without getting agitated. Talk shows love
to get our attention with debates on a whole catalogue of issues, with
common topics being war, global warming, discrimination, sexuality,
terrorism, morality, and religion. Debates on these issues can leave us
dumbstruck. We might be left aghast that others vehemently support a war
that we oppose or that they are opposed to an energy saving initiative that we
like. We might be particularly perturbed when our friends or relatives chime
in with unexpected views, and we may desperately wish to change their
minds. In these situations, we are all united by a desire to understand and
shape other people’s attitudes.
This desire has long been held by human beings. Some of the attitude
conflicts that puzzle people now (e.g., health care, immigration) are different
from those that perturbed people in prior generations (e.g., slavery), but the
basic quest to understand attitudes is the same. Fortunately, there has been an
exciting advance in this quest. At the beginning of the previous century,
social psychologists began to realize that scientific methods can be used to
better understand attitudes and how they change. This recognition eventually
grew into a conviction that attitudes are indispensable for understanding
social psychological processes (e.g., Allport, 1935; Eagly & Chaiken, 1993;
Eiser, 1994).
Research on attitudes is now flourishing. In the past century, the field has
moved from questions like “Can attitudes be measured?” to questions like
“Which measures are most useful?” Research is now using complex and
intriguing perspectives to tackle fascinating theoretical and practical
problems in the study of attitudes.
As research has progressed, it has become clear that it is time to rethink the
nature of this important construct and how it is taught. This textbook offers a
novel approach to this issue, focusing on what attitudes are and on what they
do for us. The text attempts to cover the essential items of information that
have been garnered from past research, while integrating recent advances in a
simple way. The book will focus on basic theory and research in the area,
while highlighting applications and real life examples.
The text is aimed at upper-year undergraduates and postgraduates who are
enrolled in courses on attitudes and attitude change. Because of this aim at
higher levels of study, it is important that the text stimulates critical thinking
about the models and evidence that are presented. Consequently, the book
frequently presents questions that challenge students to think more deeply
about the issues. Our hope is that students who read this text will come away
with a better understanding of what we know and do not know about
attitudes.
At the same time, we have done our best to create a text with relevance to
the treatment of attitudes in institutions of higher education around the world.
Although the bulk of the pivotal research on attitudes has emerged from the
United States, key findings have also emerged from studies in numerous
countries, including Australia, Belgium, Canada, China, France, Germany,
Great Britain, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Portugal, and
Spain. We have attempted to cover key research from most if not all of these
nations, which helps to integrate diverse perspectives on the psychology of
attitudes.
This book includes four sections. The first section looks at what attitudes
are and why they are important. The second section examines the ability of
attitudes to predict behavior. From there, we consider how attitudes are
formed and changed. Finally, we present a variety of major issues for
understanding internal (e.g., neurological) and external influences on attitude
(e.g., culture), along with unresolved questions.
THANKS (AGAIN)
We want to end this Preface by thanking a series of people for their help in
bringing this revision to fruition. Let’s start with some people from SAGE.
As ever, we thank Michael Carmichael for his support (and his updates on the
wavering fortunes of the Toronto Blue Jays, Maple Leafs, and Raptors). Keri
Dickens was always helpful in making things get done on time. From a
professional perspective, we are extremely grateful for the efforts of our
mentors, Jim Olson and Mark Zanna, who nurtured our interest in the study
of attitudes. We are very fortunate to have fantastic social psychology
colleagues in the School of Psychology at Cardiff University – Tony
Manstead, Job van der Schalk, and Ulrich von Hecker. We also want to thank
Richard Petty and Mark Conner for their work in reading an early draft of the
first edition and providing very helpful feedback.
Last, and certainly not least, our families deserve special mention. Our
wives and children have been patient and supportive throughout the entire
process. Because of their support, this project has been a lot of fun. Thanks
Audra, Kestrel, and Gabriella. Thanks Maggie, Charlotte, and Ceara.
REFERENCES
Allport, G. W. (1935) Attitudes. In C. Murchison (ed.), Handbook of Social
Psychology (pp. 798–844). Worcester, MA: Clark University Press.
Eagly, A. H. and Chaiken, S. (1993) The Psychology of Attitudes. Orlando,
FL: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.
Eiser, J. R. (1994) Attitudes, Chaos, and the Connectionist Mind. Oxford:
Blackwell.
SECTION 1
INTRODUCTION: WHY DO ATTITUDES
MATTER?
In our daily lives, we often use the term attitude to mean different things.
Have you ever met someone with a “bad attitude?” We might say that a
person has a “bad attitude” because he has a negative outlook on life. From a
social psychological perspective, the term attitude has a somewhat different
meaning. In this section of the book, we want to tell you what social
psychologists mean when they use the term attitude.
In Chapter 1, we will begin by introducing past and present
conceptualizations of attitudes. This discussion will highlight the basic
characteristic of an attitude – an association in memory between an attitude
object and an evaluation of it. Basically, an attitude refers to how much we
like (and/or dislike) something. After showing how social psychologists
define the concept of attitude, we will describe some of the issues that
motivated researchers to begin investigating attitudes and how the empirical
study of attitudes has evolved over time. We will see that scientists who
study attitudes seek to discover how people’s opinions are shaped and how
their attitudes influence their behavior. Chapter 1 also deals with how we
measure attitudes. Through the years, attitudes have been assessed using a
variety of techniques. In the last half of the opening chapter, we will
introduce you to some of the more prominent ways of measuring people’s
opinions.
The primary aim of Chapter 2 is to introduce the metaphor of the three
witches of attitudes: content, structure, and function. We label these as three
“witches” because we strongly believe that they operate more effectively
together than in isolation, in the same way that three witches combine in
folklore to make a potent brew. Attitude content refers to cognitive, affective,
and behavioral information that people associate with attitude objects.
Attitude structure refers to whether attitudes are best conceptualized as
unidimensional (e.g., like/dislike as a single continuum) or bidimensional
(e.g., like and dislike as separate continuums). Attitude function refers to the
psychological needs that are served by attitudes. Chapter 2 will introduce
some basic insights regarding each of the witches and foreshadow how
attitude content, structure, and function are relevant to each section of the
book.
1
QUESTIONS TO PONDER
1. What do we mean by the term “attitude”?
2. Why are attitudes interesting and important?
3. Why did social psychologists first start studying attitudes?
4. How do we measure attitudes?
PREVIEW
Within this chapter we consider what attitudes are and how they are
measured. We see how common definitions emphasize that attitudes are
summary evaluations (e.g., like/dislike) of objects. We provide a brief
history of research on the attitude construct, explaining why social
psychologists first started studying attitudes, how research interests have
changed over the past century, and why attitudes are interesting and
important. We also discuss how attitudes are measured. We will see that
a person’s attitudes can be assessed in many different ways.
WHAT IS AN ATTITUDE?
Do you remember the last great party you attended? What did you talk about?
Who did you talk about? Chances are you talked about things and people that
you like or dislike. You might have expressed the view that you disliked your
country’s President or Prime Minister, had mixed feelings about the latest
Meryl Streep film, or that you really liked your social psychology class. In
every case, you were talking about your attitudes – your likes and dislikes.
Attitudes are important. They influence how we view the world, what we
think, and what we do. Because attitudes are vital in understanding human
thought and behavior, social psychologists have devoted a lot of attention to
understanding how we form attitudes, how our attitudes influence our daily
life, and how our attitudes change over time. In this book, we want to tell you
about what social psychologists call an attitude.
In thinking about these questions, perhaps the best place to start is by
defining the term attitude. Like most constructs in psychology, the attitude
concept has been defined in many ways. In their influential text The
Psychology of Attitudes, Alice Eagly and Shelly Chaiken (1993, p. 1) define
attitude as “a psychological tendency that is expressed by evaluating a
particular entity with some degree of favor or disfavor.” Russell Fazio (1995,
p. 247) defines attitude as “an association in memory between a given object
and a given summary evaluation of the object.” Richard Petty and John
Cacioppo (1981, p. 7) define attitude as “a general and enduring positive or
negative feeling about some person, object, or issue.” Finally, Mark Zanna
and John Rempel (1988, p. 319) define attitude as “the categorization of a
stimulus object along an evaluative dimension.”
Notice that all of these definitions emphasize evaluative judgments about
an object. Indeed, most attitude theorists would argue that evaluation is the
predominant aspect of the attitude concept. In other words, reporting an
attitude involves making a decision of liking versus disliking, or favoring
versus disfavoring a particular issue, object, or person. As such, attitudes
summarize different types of information about an issue, object, or person.
That is, all of our relevant thoughts, feelings, and past experiences get rolled
up into a single evaluative summary. As we will see in Chapter 2, thoughts,
feelings, and past behaviors are important sources of information for
attitudes. Thus, we define attitude as an overall evaluation of an object that is
based on cognitive, affective, and behavioral information.
An attitude, when conceptualized as an evaluative judgment, can vary in
two important ways (see Eagly & Chaiken, 1993, 1998). First, attitudes differ
in valence, or positive versus negative direction of evaluation. For instance,
both authors of this text hold some positive attitudes (we like the music of
The Police), negative attitudes (we dislike liver), and neutral attitudes (we
feel pretty average toward tomato juice). Second, attitudes differ in strength,
which is a term encompassing their stability, ability to withstand attack,
capacity to influence how we process information, and ability to guide
behavior (see Petty & Krosnick, 1995). For example, while one of us really
hates liver, the other feels less strongly. Throughout the book (and especially
in Chapter 4), we will see that differences in valence and strength play an
important role in understanding how attitudes guide our processing of
information and our behavior.
Until now, we have used a number of objects when providing examples of
our own attitudes. This leads to the question “What is an attitude object?”
Basically, attitude objects can be anything that is evaluated along a
dimension of favorability. As others have noted (see Eagly & Chaiken,
1993), some attitude objects are abstract (e.g., liberalism) and others are
concrete (e.g., a red Corvette car). One’s own self (e.g., self-esteem) and
other individuals (e.g., a particular politician) can also serve as attitude
objects, as can social policy issues (e.g., death penalty) and social groups
(e.g., people from Canada). Throughout the book, we will use a number of
examples when describing research that social psychologists have carried out
on the attitude concept.
KEY POINTS
• An attitude is an evaluative judgment about a stimulus object.
• Attitudes differ in valence and strength.
• Attitude objects can be anything that is liked or disliked.
A starting point
As noted above, empirical research relevant to the psychology of attitudes
can be traced to the early 20th century. In the 1920s, a number of individuals
became interested in measuring subjective mental properties like attitudes. At
that time, such was the importance of work on attitude measurement that
social psychology was often defined as the study of attitudes (McGuire,
1985). Two significant researchers from that era were Louis Thurstone and
Rensis Likert. Thurstone and Likert developed various ways for measuring
attitudes, most notably the Equal Appearing Interval method (Thurstone,
1928; Thurstone & Chave, 1929) and the Likert scale (see Likert, 1932).
Thurstone’s and Likert’s research was highly influential because it
demonstrated that attitudes can be quantifiably measured – paving the way
for the development of the discipline. In fact, the ability of scientists to
measure attitudes was seen as an enormous breakthrough, as evidenced by
the title of one Thurstone’s first journal articles on this topic: “Attitudes can
be measured.” Even today, Likert scales remain an important tool for
researchers interested in assessing attitudes and opinions. We will learn about
Thurstone’s and Likert’s contributions later in this chapter.
In addition to developing strategies designed to measure attitudes, early
research also considered the degree to which individuals’ attitudes influence
their behavior. In a famous paper, Richard LaPiere (1934) reported his
experience traveling across the United States of America with a young
Chinese couple. At the time of the travels, there was widespread anti-Asian
prejudice in the United States. As a result of this prejudice, LaPiere was
concerned whether he and his traveling companions would be refused service
in hotels and restaurants. Much to his surprise, only once (in over 250
establishments) were they not served. A few months after the completion of
the journey, LaPiere sent a letter to each of the visited establishments and
asked whether they would serve Chinese visitors. Of the establishments that
replied, only one indicated that it would serve them. This finding was taken
as evidence that a person’s attitudes do not necessarily impact their behavior.
While there were a number of problems with LaPiere’s work (e.g., the
measures of attitude and behavior are not suitable by modern standards; see
Chapter 3), the study was seminal in its consideration of whether attitudes
predict behavior. The study of when and how attitudes guide behavior (and
how behavior influences attitudes) remains at the forefront of attitude
research. Indeed, we devote an entire section of this book to this issue.