ATTITUDE

INTRODUCTION

attitude object the thing (e.g. idea, person, behaviour) that is accorded a favourable or unfavourable attitude attribution an individual’s belief about causality 362 Attitudes, Attributions and Social Cognition above may reveal negative attitudes towards immigrants in their behaviour, their self-reports may appear more positive because they are reluctant to seem prejudiced. Contemporary research therefore frequently uses non-self-report measures in cases like this – i.e. when people’s ability to rate their attitudes accurately is questionable. Despite this weakness, self-report measures have predicted a variety of relevant behaviours in past research, which suggests that we are at least somewhat accurate in reporting our own attitudes. Other measures elicit attitudes without relying on self-reports and without relying on overt behaviours towards the attitude object. For example, a common approach is to present the names of objects that people might like or dislike on a computer screen. Then the computer presents an adjective (e.g. terrible, pleasant) and respondents are asked to decide whether it means a good thing or bad thing. This question is easy to answer, and most people can answer correctly every time. Nonetheless, responses to adjectives with a positive meaning (e.g. delightful) tend to be faster after people have seen something they like than after seeing something they do not like, whereas responses to adjectives with a negative connotation (e.g. awful) tend to be slower after people have seen something they like than after seeing something they dislike. By contrasting the speed of responses to the positive and negative adjectives, researchers can obtain a measure of attitude that predicts behaviour towards an attitude object (Fazio et al., 1995).

Definition of attitude

In the Handbook of Social Psychology Allport (1935) called an attitude \the most distinctive and indispensable concept in social psychology". Despite a common agreement on the relevance of the concept, over decades, theorists have varied greatly in their opinions on the adequate definition of an attitude (e.g., Dawes & Smith, 1985).

The definition appeared in the literature relatively early, but it was so broad that it could describe virtually any psychological construct of interest. Allport (1935) proposed that an attitude is \a mental and neural state of readiness, organized through experience, exerting a directive or dynamic inuence upon the individual's response to all objects and situations with which it is related".

 Growing need to measure an attitude contributed to further narrowing of the concept. Most researchers have proceeded from the definition of Katz (1960) who proposed that an attitude is the predisposition of the individual to evaluate a particular object in a favorable or unfavorable manner" (p. 1968).

 ATTITUDES

What is an attitude?

Allport (1935) defined an attitude as a mental or neural state of readiness, organized through experience, exerting a directive or dynamic influence on the individual’s response to all objects and situations to which it is related. A simpler definition of attitude is a mindset or a tendency to act in a particular way due to both an individual’s experience and temperament.

Formation of Attitudes

How are attitudes formed? Attitude formation is a result of learning, modeling others, and our direct experiences with people and situations. Attitudes influence our decisions, guide our behavior, and impact what we selectively remember (not always the same as what we hear). Attitudes come in different strengths, and like most things that are learned or influenced through experience, they can be measured and they can be changed.

THE THREE COMPONENTS OF ATTITUDE

An important feature of attitudes is their ability to sum up several types of psychological information. Consider an American who favours US membership in a global pact to reduce air pollution. Her positive attitude towards the pact may summarize relevant cognitions, emotions and behaviours. She may believe that the pact will be good for the environment (cognition);  feel excited when she hears plans for the pact (emotion); and sign a petition supporting the pact (behaviour).

HOW DO YOU MEASURE AN ATTITUDE?

An attitude cannot be recorded directly. We cannot view someone’s tendency to like something in the way we can see physical attributes, such as eye colour or running speed. Another difficulty is that attitudes can be expressed through many behaviours. For example, a person who likes music might listen to it all the time, buy countless CDs, attend numerous music concerts, and buy several magazines about music. How does a researcher go from information about such a variety of behaviours to an estimate of the person’s fundamental attitude towards music? One general approach is to examine one or more specific behaviours that are seen as directly reflecting attitude. For example, a person who has a negative attitude towards a particular immigrant group is likely to seek more physical distance from members of that group, avoid eye contact with them, show unpleasant facial expressions, and so on. Another general approach employs self-report questionnaires, which ask participants to express their attitude towards the particular object. The most common version simply asks respondents to indicate their attitudes towards a named object using semantic-differential scales. So people might be asked to rate their attitude towards immigrants using a scale from −3 (extremely bad) to +3 (extremely good). Typically, though, people rate their attitude using several different scales, each labelled by different adjective pairs (negative/positive, worthless/valuable, unfavourable/ favourable). Responses to the scales are then averaged to form an attitude score for each participant Of course, self-report measures can be affected by people’s desire to state socially desirable attitudes. So while our respondents we try to make sense of events and the behaviour of other people. Why did I get so angry in the meeting yesterday? Why did Sally leave Harry? Why does Hannah’s baby have leukemia? Why did Manchester United fail to make the cup final this year? Attribution theory is the process of deriving causal explanations for events and behaviour – an important field of investigation in social psychology. The Austrian psychologist Fritz Heider (1958) saw this process as part of a commonsense or naïve psychology – a basic property of human thinking that fulfils a need to predict and control the environment.

The final topic of this chapter binds the first two topics together. Attitudes and attributions summarize vast amounts of information from our complex social world. How do we process this information? And how do we use it to make judgements and draw inferences? These questions are central to the study of social cognition. Many of the concepts and experimental methods central to this field have been borrowed from work in cognitive psychology. But, while cognitive psychology concerns itself with how we perceive physical stimuli and objects, social cognition focuses on the perception and processing of social objects, such as people, social groups and events.

semantic-differential scales these measure attitudes by using a dimension that depicts a strongly negative attitude at one end to a strongly positive attitude at the other Attitudes 363 This example illustrates the three-component model of attitude structure, which states that beliefs, feelings and behaviours form three distinct types of psychological information that are closely tied to attitudes.

This model predicts that:

1. beliefs, feelings and behaviour towards an object can influence attitudes towards it; and reciprocally

2. attitudes towards an object can influence beliefs, feelings and behaviours towards it. In other words, any particular attitude affects these three components and or is affected by them.

Using the scales below, please indicate your attitude towards immigrants. Immigrants are:

Extremely bad –3

Extremely harmful –3

Extremely dislikeable –3

Extremely negative –3

Very bad –2

Slightly bad –1

Bad or Good?

Neither 0

Harmful or Beneficial?

Neither 0

Dislikeable or Likeable?

Neither 0

Negative or Positive?

Neither 0

Slightly Harmful –1

Slightly dislikeable –1

Slightly negative –1

Attitude = Mean rating

= (2+3+0+1) / 4

= 1.50

Very harmful –2

Very dislikeable –2

Very negative –2

Slightly good +1

Slightly beneficial +1

Slightly likeable +1

Slightly positive +1

Very good +2

Extremely good +3

Extremely beneficial +3

Extremely likeable +3

Extremely positive +3

Very beneficial +2

Very likeable +2

Very positive +2

Sample semantic–differential scale.

Beliefs

Feelings

 Behaviour

The three-component model of attitudes.

three-component model states that beliefs, feelings and behaviour towards an object can influence attitudes towards it, and that these attitudes can reciprocally influence the beliefs, feelings and behaviours

Effects of beliefs

It could be argued that persuasive messages such as advertisements often change attitudes by changing people’s beliefs about the object of the message. For example, anti-smoking ads attempt to change people’s beliefs about the consequences of smoking, and those beliefs should in turn influence their attitude towards smoking. Consider a simple experiment in which Canadian participants received a booklet describing a study of a new immigrant group to Canada (Maio, Esses & Bell, 1994). The information in the booklet was manipulated to create positive and/or negative beliefs about the group. For example, some participants read that the immigrants scored above average on desirable personality traits (e.g. hardworking, honest), whereas other participants read that the group members scored below average on these traits. After reading the information, participants rated their attitudes towards the group. Not surprisingly, the results indicated that those who received positive information indicated more favourable attitudes towards the immigrant group than those who received negative information. This simple demonstration is important from a practical perspective, because it demonstrates how even second-hand information about others can have a powerful effect on our attitudes towards them. When prejudice has arisen largely from indirect information, interventions encourage direct, positive interactions to change beliefs and reduce the prejudice.

Effects of feelings

If you look carefully at advertisements, you will find that many give very little information about the objects they are promoting. For example, an advertisement for a Citroen car shows 364 Attitudes, Attributions and Social Cognition than those that are paired with negative stimuli. This effect occurs even when the attitudes are measured in a different context. For example, one clever experiment exposed participants to a series of names, each followed by a positive or negative word. In this list, (a) positive words were linked with the name ‘Ed’ and negative words with the name ‘George’ or (b) positive words were linked with the name ‘George’ and negative words with the name ‘Ed’ (Berkowitz & Knurek, 1969). Participants then went to an ostensibly unrelated experiment, where they had a brief discussion with two confederates. The confederates’ first names were George and Ed. Later, the confederates rated each participant’s friendliness towards them as an indication of their attitudes. As expected, the participants were friendlier (i.e. they had a more positive attitude) towards the confederate whose name had been paired with the positive stimuli.

Effects of behaviour

Initiation rituals have often been prerequisites for acceptance into social groups, such as military squads and college fraternities and sororities. Would-be new members may be asked to perform embarrassing acts, such as streaking nude at a public event or dressing in a strange costume during classes. Why do new recruits not leave a group after enduring such ordeals? One possible explanation is that the behaviour of submission to group rules leads to more positive attitudes towards the group. In other words, the new recruit’s behaviour affects his attitudes. For many decades, the general effect of behaviour on attitudes has captured a great deal of interest. Researchers first began to notice an interesting effect arising from role-playing. For example, participants assigned to play the role of a person diagnosed with terminal lung cancer later reported more negative attitudes towards smoking than those who had listened to an audiotape of the roleplay ( Janis & Mann, 1965). Similarly, people assigned to debate a particular position on an issue such as legalized abortion subsequently express a more favourable attitude towards the position they have been required to advocate (e.g. Janis & King, 1954). People who merely listen to the participants’ arguments do not show so much attitude change. Something about the role-playing behaviour drives the change.

What if the role-playing task explicitly requires counter-attitudinal advocacy – presenting an attitude or opinion that opposes the person’s previous attitude? Suppose university students are asked to write an essay arguing for increased tuition fees – a position that obviously contradicts most students’ feelings on this issue. Amazingly, they still tend to change their attitudes towards the position they have advocated (see Cooper & Fazio, 1984; Harmon-Jones & Mills, 1999). Another interesting finding is that this attitude change is more likely when participants are given only a small incentive to argue the counterattitudinal position than when they are given a large incentive. Super model Claudia Schiffer smiling and undressing on her way to the car, while upbeat music plays in the background. Rather than focusing on concrete information (e.g. performance, fuel economy), ads like this work by linking the product with positive feelings. Research supports this technique. Many studies use a classical conditioning approach (see chapter 4), which exposes participants to the name of an attitude object together with an accompanying positive or negative stimulus (e.g. Cacioppo, Marshall-Goodell, Tassinary & Petty, 1992; Zanna, Kiesler & Pilkonis, 1970). Sometimes the stimulus is a direct, pleasant or unpleasant experience (e.g. presence or absence of a shock), and sometimes it is simply a word that has positive or negative association (e.g. ‘happy’ vs. ‘sad’). The stimuli evoke positive or negative affective responses. which in turn become linked in memory with the attitude object. So, whenever the attitude object is presented, the positive or negative affective response is recalled and experienced by association. As you might expect, results typically indicate that people come to like objects that are paired with positive stimuli more.

Measurement of Attitudes

Since the publication of Thurstone’s procedure for attitude assessment in 1929 (Thurstone & Chave, 1929), employee surveys have been widely used in organizations to obtain information about workers’ attitudes toward their environments. This information is helpful for healthcare managers to determine if management is “doing the right things” for retaining and motivating employees. As an example, Lowe, Schellenberg, and Shannon (2003) found that workers who rated their work environments as “healthy” (task content, pay, work hours, career prospects, interpersonal relationships, security) reported higher job satisfaction, morale, and organizational commitment and lower absenteeism and intent to quit. Employee attitude surveys are usually designed using 5-point Likerttype (“strongly agree–strongly disagree”) or frequency (“never–very often”) response formats.

Legend (check the correct number that applies to each question):

1 _ Strongly Disagree 2 _ Disagree 3 _ Neutral

4 _ Agree 5 _ Strongly Agree 1 2 3 4 5

1. Do you feel that your salary reflects your worth to the organization?

2. Do you feel appreciated for your work performance?

3. Do you feel a sense of achievement for your work efforts?

4. Are you provided the opportunity for growth advancement to higher level tasks?

5. Do you feel that you contribute to the overall success of the organization?

6. Would you recommend the organization to family and friends?

7. Are you given the opportunity to learn new skills through formal training?

8. Do you feel the organization provides adequate resources to complete your work?

9. Do you feel overwhelmed by your workload?

10. Do you experience ongoing interests in your job/tasks?

Changing Attitudes

How do you change someone’s attitude? To change a person’s attitude you need to address the cognitive and emotional components. How would you convince another person to start an exercise program when the individual may say, “I don’t have enough time” or “I’m just too busy” or “I don’t want to risk being injured”? One approach would be to challenge someone’s behavior by providing new information. As an example, explain to the other person how you made time in your day and, as a result, both your cholesterol level and blood pressure decreased. This is a cognitive approach when a person is presented with new information. Providing new information is one method for changing a person’s attitude and therefore his or her behavior. Attitude transformation takes time, effort, and determination, but it can be done. It is important not to expect to change a person’s attitudes quickly. Managers need to understand that attitude change takes time 2003). Attitudes are formed over a lifetime through an individual’s socialization process. An individual’s socialization process includes his or her formation of values and beliefs during childhood years, influenced not only by family, religion, and culture but also by socioeconomic factors. This socialization process affects a person’s attitude toward work and his or her related behavior.

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                        Attribution Theory

Since the 1950s, researchers have tried to understand and explain why people do what they do. Attribution theory was first introduced by Heidler (1958) as “naive psychology” to help explain the behaviors of others by describing ways in which people make casual explanations for their actions. Heidler believed that people have two behavioral motives:

(1) the need to understand the world around them; and (2) the need to control their environment. Heidler proposed that people act on the basis of their beliefs whether or not these beliefs are valid. Weiner (1979) suggested that individuals justify their performance decisions by cognitively constructing their reality in terms of internal–external, controllable– uncontrollable, and stable–unstable factors.

According to Weiner (1979), when one tries to describe the processes of explaining events and the relating behavior, external or internal attributions can be given. An external attribution assigns causality to an outside agent or force. An external attribution claims that some outside force motivated the event. By contrast, an internal attribution assigns causality to factors within the person. An internal attribution claims that the person was directly responsible for the event. Controllability .