ATTITUDES Attitudes include beliefs (cognitive) and feelings (affective) that predispose us to act (behavior) in a certain way toward objects, people, events, etc. → attitudes can vary in strength and resistance to change (strong = resistant), how often and easily they come to mind (accessibility), or ambivalence (the ratio of positive to negative evaluations)

EXPLICIT VS. IMPLICIT ATTITUDES In today’s world having a prejudiced explicit attitude (bias) – conscious and easily accessible – is discouraged and most people would say they that prejudice is wrong → however, research on implicit attitudes (bias) – covert, expressed subtly and unconsciously – shows that despite our belief that we are unbiased, negative stereotypes influence our subconscious

EXPLICIT VS. IMPLICIT ATTITUDES Implicit attitudes can be measured using an Implicit Association Test (IAT) which measures reaction times to different sets of stimuli → IAT test results show that despite expressed unbiased explicit attitudes, a strong majority of people show implicit prejudice towards various groups

EXPLICIT VS. IMPLICIT ATTITUDES → negative implicit biases have been shown to have predictive value for subtle prejudicial behavior

ATTITUDES, BEHAVIOR AND PERSUASION A correlation between attitudes and behavior does exist, but is perhaps not as strong as might be predicted → the stronger the attitude the better the predictor of behavior, but even strong attitudes are subject to situational constraints: social expectations shape behavior along with attitudes

ATTITUDES, BEHAVIOR AND PERSUASION Our attitudes are under constant bombardment from those who hope to change them (and thus our behavior) through persuasion → Two forms of persuasion are 1) peripheral route: incidental cues (i.e., a speaker’s attractiveness) cause snap judgments, and 2) central route: evidence and arguments create favorable thoughts (which creates more durable attitude change due to more cognitive elaboration) * These two together are referred to as the elaboration likelihood model of attitude change in your book

ATTITUDES, BEHAVIOR AND PERSUASION Variables in the success of efforts at persuasion can be related to source factors: is the communicator credible due to expertise? is he/she/it trustworthy? is he/she it likable? → the content of the message can also persuade (or not): does the message acknowledge an opposing side (two-sided argument)? does it appeal to fear or logic (and does this work?)?

ATTITUDES, BEHAVIOR AND PERSUASION → how often has it been repeated? The more repetition, the more something is perceived as true (which may be based on the mere exposure effect)

ATTITUDES, BEHAVIOR AND PERSUASION The best defense against persuasion is awareness of the effort to be persuaded, thus beware the following strategies of persuasion: 1) The foot-in-the-door technique → persuading someone to agree to a small request in order to increase the chance they will comply later to a larger request (opposite of door-in-the-face) 2) Reciprocity norm → persuading someone to pay back in kind what has been received from others (free samples, etc.) 3) The lowball technique → persuading someone to commit to an attractive deal (bargain price) before revealing hidden costs

ATTITUDE FORMATION AND CHANGE Learning theory proposes that attitudes can be attained in similar ways as other phenomena, such as fears; for example, evaluative (classical) conditioning influences the emotional component of attitudes (ads) → operant conditioning occurs when attitudes are reinforced (strengthened) or punished (diminished); observational learning from any # of sources can be influential

ATTITUDE FORMATION AND CHANGE Leon Festinger’s cognitive dissonance theory says that attitudes can change when we act to reduce the discomfort (dissonance) we feel when two of our thoughts are inconsistent → the more tension is created by the contradicting thoughts, the more likely we are to change our attitudes to relieve the tension (i.e., the more likely we are to believe our own lies)