1 Psychology and human development1.10 Social psychology
1.10.1.1 Attitudes
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Written by Resident Doctor Committee · Published
What an attitude is
An attitude is a learned favourable or unfavourable evaluation of an object. "Lithium is renally excreted" is a belief, while "lithium is poison" expresses an attitude.
Component | Content | Attitude to antipsychotic medication |
|---|---|---|
Cognitive | Beliefs about the object | "It keeps me out of hospital" |
Affective | Feelings towards it | Humiliation at needing it |
Behavioural (conative) | Readiness to act | Hiding tablets |
Strength is the intensity and certainty with which an attitude is held, and strong attitudes resist persuasion.
Accessibility is how readily an attitude comes to mind, and it is greater after direct experience.
Ambivalence is holding strong positive and negative evaluations at once, which a midpoint score can hide.
Attitudes and behaviour
An attitude predicts behaviour better when it is strong, consistent, formed through direct experience, specific to the act and easily accessible.
LaPiere (1934) found that most businesses that said they would refuse Chinese guests had in fact served a Chinese couple.
Specificity matters because a general attitude to health does not predict whether this tablet is taken tonight, but the attitude to taking this tablet does.
Ajzen's theory of planned behaviour links attitude, subjective norm and perceived control to intention, adding perceived control to Fishbein and Ajzen's theory of reasoned action.
Persuasion
Hovland's Yale group studied how the source, message, channel, audience and setting affect persuasion.
Credibility, meaning expertise and trustworthiness, makes a communicator's message more persuasive (Hovland and Weiss, 1951).
Assimilation-contrast theory (Sherif and Hovland) describes how people judge a message against their own attitude, using latitudes of acceptance, rejection and non-commitment.
Messages in the latitude of acceptance seem closer to one's own view than they are (assimilation).
Messages in the latitude of rejection seem more extreme than they are (contrast).
Ego-involved attitudes tend to polarise.
McGuire's chain runs from attention to comprehension, acceptance and retention, and a failure at any stage prevents lasting change.
Cognitive dissonance
Cognitive dissonance (Leon Festinger, 1957) is an aversive state of psychological tension that arises when two cognitions, or an attitude and one's own behaviour, conflict. It motivates change to reduce it.
Dissonance grows with the importance of the cognitions and the degree of conflict.
Information that merely seems implausible, without clashing with an existing belief, does not produce dissonance.
Way to reduce dissonance | Smoker's example |
|---|---|
Change a cognition or the behaviour | Stops smoking |
Lower the importance of a cognition | Disputes or minimises the harm |
Add consonant, justifying cognitions | "It relieves my stress" |
The theory does not predict which route wins, and more alarming information can provoke justification rather than change.
Festinger and Carlsmith found that people paid $1 to praise a dull task later enjoyed it more than those paid $20, because they lacked external justification.
Effort justification is when a person who paid a high price in effort, money or discomfort for a poor outcome inflates the value of what they went through.
Effort justification inflates the value of a past cost, whereas the sunk cost fallacy predicts continued investment.
Attitude scales
Scale | Where item values come from | What the respondent does | Score |
|---|---|---|---|
Thurstone equal-appearing interval | Independent judges sort statements into eleven favourability piles; the median placement becomes each value | Endorses or rejects each statement | From the judges' values of endorsed items; numerical, approximately interval |
Likert summated rating | The respondents themselves | Grades agreement with favourable and unfavourable statements on the same ordered categories, usually five or seven | Item scores added; ordinal, treated as interval |
Semantic differential (Osgood) | The respondents themselves | Rates one concept on seven-point scales anchored by pairs of opposite adjectives | A profile across the scales |
Guttman | Cumulative ordering of items | Endorses items, where endorsing a stronger one implies endorsing every weaker one | One score reproduces the whole response pattern |
Q-sort (Stephenson) | The individual's own ranking | Ranks statements into piles under a forced, roughly normal distribution | Whole sorts are correlated across people |
Visual analogue | A single continuous line anchored by the absence and the extreme of one attribute | Marks one point on the line | The distance along the line |
Likert scales reverse-score negative items before adding, so the metric comes from respondents, not judges, and mixed wording reduces acquiescence.
Thurstone construction is laborious, and judges' own views can bias the values.
Semantic differential ratings typically load on three factors: evaluation (good or bad), potency (strong or weak) and activity (active or passive).
The semantic differential's characteristic weakness is positional response bias, whereas acquiescence belongs to agree-or-disagree statements.
Guttman scales are unidimensional, and scalability is checked with a coefficient of reproducibility, conventionally 0.9 or above.
Q methodology measures an individual's subjective viewpoint, and Rogers used it to track the gap between actual and ideal self.