Attitudes: foundations and debates George Gaskell Flagship Series Department of Social Psychology

Attitudes are alive and well The importance of data on attitudes and opinions in many disciplines and in social research can hardly be denied. The political opinion poll is the “ideal type”. Expressed preferences as a proxy for choices and action Hence the reliance on attitude measurement in many domains – social and political research, marketing, organisational research, communications etc. I’m currently involved in the design, analysis and reporting of surveys on the ‘Life Sciences’ and ‘Food risks’ in which the data collection amounts to €1.6m Yet in social psychology there is a continuing debate about the status of the concept.

Some of the heated debates in social psychology Social representations cf Moscovici and Duveen and Jovchelovitch. Attitudes as epi-phenomena: the discourse tradition ( Potter and Billig). Neuro-cognitive psychological approaches – brain mechanisms and MRI scans. ‘Fundamental’ research to establish reliable and valid techniques for measurement, (Krosnick). Concerns about response variability due to context effects and question wording, (Gaskell) and attitudes as on-line constructions (Zaller) A return to affect (Schwarz)

Early theories Thomas and Znaniecki: attitudes as the individual counterpart to social values This Durkheimian tradition was reinterpreted by Asch who saw attitudes as social sentiments – deep seated and an essential part of the fabric of a group.

Allport and the individualisation of the social Allport, G. (1954) the attitude: ‘a mental or neural state of readiness, organised through experience, exerting a directive or dynamic influence on the individuals responses to all objects and situations with which it is related’ This definition represents the hard core assumption : attitudes are the mental triggers of action. A uni-directional causal path from attitudes to behaviours: the ‘projectile model’.

Competing philosophical positions Historically most researchers treat the attitude as a hypothetical construct But different conceptions as to the nature of the construct. An implicit response to a given object – an evaluation of some aspect of an unproblematic reality that is out there – the Cartesian position. Attitudes are part of the construction of reality, a template through which reality is created – the Gestalt/constructivist approach

3 component model of attitudes Rosenberg – Yale School Stimulus Attitude Cognitive: what you know Evaluative: what you feel Behavioural: what you do Observable antecedents Hypothetical variable Observable responses

Attitudes can be measured Take 50 or so statements about a social object Thurstone’s technique: judges allocate the statements on an interval scale from positive to negative Item analysis leads to selection of circa 12 items that amount to a ruler to determine where a person is located on the attitudinal dimension Likert’s technique: judges rate statements on scale - strongly agree (+2) thru neither agree nor disagree (0) to strongly disagree (-2). Can be from 5 to 11 scale points Item analysis leads to selection of questions which individually correlate with the total of all items Leading to a cumulative scale – respondents indicate level of agreement/disagreement to all items. Helped along by developments in statistical sampling theory

Theory and measurement drive programmes of research Quantitative index of the affective component Measurement equals ‘science’ Parallel developments of the cognitive component not pursued Justification from consistency theory – the three components in a dynamic equilibrium cf Festinger’s cognitive dissonance – if behaviour is at variance with cognition and affect then rationalisation.

A troubling anomaly: ‘what we say and what we do’ Concerns about the unquestioned link between attitudes and behaviour. - La Pierre. Wicker (1969) “taken as a whole (a meta- analysis), these studies show that attitudes are more likely to be only slightly or unrelated to behaviour”. Essentially, the projectile model abandoned (or should have been) as the projectile’s progress is affected by laws, norms and social pressures – the social context This should have been obvious from research into group processes cf Kurt Lewin in the 1950s

Fishbein – the basis of modern theorising on the attitude A 2 component model Attitude becomes the affect (+ve or –ve) attached to an object. Cognition is beliefs about the object And behavioural intention (note not behaviour, since the road to hell is paved with good intentions) is a function of the attitude and social normative beliefs. Extended into a model of planned behaviour and the basis for health beliefs model

Problems with the attitude construct One from of representing the world – a ranking in terms of preference; but there are other ways of representing the world that are of interest. On important matters ‘few think alone’; where is the social in the social psych of the attitude? Fishbein’s social normative beliefs contrasts the sovereign individual and the social world What about widespread beliefs – how do we account for these? What are the origins of attitudes? Possibly values – taking us back to the early days of social psychology. This is my current preoccupation, but that is another lecture.