Attitudes

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Attitudes

Attitude change Attitude formation Attitude measurement Attitude measures Attitude similarity Emotion and attitude change Attitudes within groups Adolescent attitudes Adult attitudes Child attitudes Client attitudes Consumer attitudes Counsellor attitudes Health personnel attitudes Parental attitudes Racial and ethnic attitudes Student attitudes Teacher attitudes Attitudes towards groups Aged (attitudes toward) Disabled (attitudes toward) Attitudes towards Aging (attitudes towards) Childrearing attitudes Community attitudes Computer attitudes Death Attitudes Doxastic attitudes Drug usage attitudes Eating attitudes Environmental attitudes Family planning attitudes Health attitudes Heterosexuality (attitudes toward) Homosexuality (attitudes toward) Marriage attitudes Obesity (attitudes toward) Physical illness (attitudes toward) Political attitudes Psychologist attitudes Sex role attitudes Sexual attitudes Socioeconomic class attitudes Work (attitudes toward)

Attitude is a hypothetical construct that represents an individual's like or dislike for an item. Attitudes are positive, negative or neutral views of an "attitude object": i.e. a person, behaviour or event. People can also be "ambivalent" towards a target, meaning that they simultaneously possess a positive and a negative bias towards the attitude in question.

Attitudes comes from judgments. Attitudes develop on the ABC model (affect, behavioral change and cognition). The affective response is a physiological response that expresses an individual's preference for an entity. The behavioral intention is a verbal indication of the intention of an individual. The cognitive response is a cognitive evaluation of the entity to form an attitude. Most attitudes in individuals are a result of observational learning from their environment. The link between attitude and behavior exists but depends on human behavior, some of which is irrational. For example, a person who is in favor of blood transfusion may not donate blood. This makes sense if the person does not like the sight of blood, which explains this irrationality.

Implicit and explicit attitudes

There is also considerable research on "implicit" attitudes, which are unconscious but have effects (identified through sophisticated methods using people's response times to stimuli). Implicit and "explicit" attitudes seem to affect people's behavior, though in different ways. They tend not to be strongly associated with each other, although in some cases they are. The relationship between them is poorly understood.

Philosophical aspect

Attitude may also be seen as a form or appearance that an individual assumes to gain or achieve an egotistic preference, whether it is acceptance, manifestation of power or other self-centered needs. Attitude may be considered as a primitive attribute to the preservation of the self or of the ego.

Attitude formation

Main article: Attitude formation

Unlike personality, attitudes are expected to change as a function of experience. Tesser (1993) has argued that hereditary variables may affect attitudes - but believes that they may do so indirectly. For example, if one inherits the disposition to become an extrovert, this may affect one's attitude to certain styles of music. There are numerous theories of attitude formation and attitude change. These include:

• Consistency theories, which imply that we must be consistent in our beliefs and values. The most famous example of such a theory is Dissonance-reduction theory, associated with Leon Festinger, although there are others, such as the balance theory of Fritz Heider.
• Self-perception theory, associated with Daryl Bem
• Meta programs, associated with Neuro-linguistic programming
• Persuasion
• Elaboration Likelihood Model associated with Richard E. Petty and the Heuristic Systematic Model of Shelly Chaiken.
• Social judgment theory
• Balance theory
• Abundance theory
• Intellect

Factors that affect attitude change

Main article: Attitude change

Attitudes can be changed through persuasion. The celebrated work of Carl Hovland, at Yale University in the 1950s and 1960s, helped to advance knowledge of persuasion. In Hovland's view, we should understand attitude change as a response to communication. He and his colleagues did experimental research into the factors that can affect the persuasiveness of a message:

Emotion and Attitude Change

Main article: Emotion and attitude change

Emotion is a common component in persuasion, social influence, and attitude change. Much of attitude research emphasized the importance of affective or emotion components (Breckler & Wiggins, 1992). Emotion works hand-in-hand with the cognitive process, or the way we think, about an issue or situation. Emotional appeals are commonly found in advertising, health campaigns and political messages. Recent examples include no-smoking health campaigns and political campaign advertising emphasizing the fear of terrorism.

Processing Models

Some research on emotion and attitude change focuses on the way people process messages. Many dual process models are used to explain the affective (emotion) and cognitive processing and interpretations of messages. These include the elaboration likelihood model, the heuristic-systematic model, and the extended parallel process model.

In the Elaboration Likelihood Model, or ELM, (Petty and Cacioppo, 1986), cognitive processing is the central route and affective/emotion processing is often associated with the peripheral route. The central route pertains to an elaborate cognitive processing of information while the peripheral route relies on cues or feelings. The ELM suggests that true attitude change only happens through the central processing route that incorporates both cognitive and affective components as opposed to the more heuristics-based peripheral route. This suggests that motivation through emotion alone will not result in an attitude change.

In the Heuristic-Systematic Model, or HSM, (Chaiken, Liberman, & Eagly, 1989) information is either processed in a high-involvement and high-effort systematic way, or information is processed through shortcuts known as heuristics. Emotions, feelings and gut-feeling reactions are often used as shortcuts.

The Extended Parallel Process Model, or EPPM, includes both thinking and feeling in conjunction with threat and fear appeals (Witte, 1992). EPPM suggests that persuasive fear appeals work best when people have high involvement and high efficacy. In other words, fear appeals are most effective when an individual cares about the issue or situation, and that individual possesses and perceives that they possess the agency to deal with that issue or situation.

Components of Emotion Appeals

Any discrete emotion can be used in a persuasive appeal; this may include jealously, disgust, indignation, fear, and anger. Fear is one of the most studied emotional appeals in communication and social influence research. Dillard (1994) suggests that “fear appeals have been thought of as messages that attempt to achieve opinion change by establishing the negative consequences of failing to agree with the advocated position” (p. 295). The EPPM (above) looks at the effectiveness of using fear and threat to change attitudes.

Important consequences of fear appeals and other emotion appeals include the possibility of reactance (Brehm & Brehm, 1981) which may lead to either message rejections or source rejection and the absence of attitude change. As the EPPM suggests, there is an optimal emotion level in motivating attitude change. If there is not enough motivation, an attitude will not change; if the emotional appeal is overdone, the motivation can be paralyzed thereby preventing attitude change.

Emotions perceived as negative or containing threat are often studied more than perceived positive emotions like humor. Though the inner-workings of humor are not agreed upon, humor appeals may work by creating incongruities in the mind (Maase, Fink & Kaplowitz, 1984). Recent research has looked at the impact of humor on the processing of political messages (Nabi, Moyer-Guse, & Byrne, 2007). While evidence is inconclusive, there appears to be potential for targeted attitude change is receivers with low political message involvement.

Important factors that influence the impact emotion appeals include self efficacy, attitude accessibility, issue involvement, and message/source features. Self efficacy is a perception of one’s own human agency; in other words, it is the perception of our own ability to deal with a situation (Bandura, 1992). It is an important variable in emotion appeal messages because it dictates a person’s ability to deal with both the emotion and the situation. For example, if a person is not self-efficacious about their ability to impact the global environment, they are not likely to change their attitude or behavior about global warming.

Dillard (1994) suggests that message features such as source non-verbal communication, message content, and receiver differences can impact the emotion impact of fear appeals. The characteristics of a message are important because one message can elicit different levels of emotion for different people. Thus, in terms of emotion appeals messages, one size does not fit all.

Attitude accessibility refers to the activation of an attitude from memory (Fazio, 1986); in other words, how readily available is an attitude about an object, issue, or situation. Issue involvement (Zaichkowsky, 1985) is the relevance and salience of an issue or situation to an individual. Issue involvement has been correlated with both attitude access and attitude strength. Past studies conclude accessible attitudes are more resistant to change (Fazio & Williams, 1986).

Attitude in the workplace

When it comes to Human Resource Management and recruiting, in recent years hire for attitude became a well known mantra. Several commercial tests such as the LAB Profile, Nowhere is your positive attitude more required and appreciated by others than your workplace. There are sound reasons for this: about 30% of an employee’s waking hours are spent at the workplace. Without some positive people around, this time could become troublesome. iWAM and PAPI were developed to measure work Attitude and motivation, e.g. for pre-employment testing

Attitude formation

Unlike personality, attitudes are expected to change as a function of experience. Tesser (1993) has argued that heredity variables may affect attitudes - but believes that may do so indirectly. For example, if one inherits the disposition to become an extrovert, this may affect one's attitude to certain styles of music. There are numerous theories of attitude formation and attitude change. These include:

• Consistency theories, which imply that we must be consistent in our beliefs and values. The most famous example of such a theory is Dissonance-reduction theory, associated with Leon Festinger, although there are others, such as the
• balance theory of Fritz Heider.
• Self-perception theory, associated with Daryl Bem
• Meta programs, associated with Neuro-linguistic programming
• Persuasion
• Elaboration Likelihood Model associated with Richard E. Petty
• Systematic Heuristic Model of Shelley Chaiken.
• Social judgment theory
• Balance theory
• Abundance theory

Attitude change

Attitudes can be changed through persuasion. The celebrated work of Carl Hovland, at Yale University in the 1950s and 1960s, helped to advance knowledge of persuasion. In Hovland's view, we should understand attitude change as a response to communication. He and his colleagues did experimental research into the factors that can affect the persuasiveness of a message:-

1. Target Characteristics: These are characteristics that refer to the person who receives and processes a message. One such is intelligence - it seems that more intelligent people are less easily persuaded by one-sided messages. Another variable that has been studied in this category is self esteem. Although it is sometimes thought that those higher in self-esteem are less easily persuaded, there is some evidence that the relationship between self-esteem and persuasibility is actually curvilinear, with people of moderate self-esteem being more easily persuaded than both those of high and low self-esteem levels (Rhodes & Woods, 1992). The mind frame and mood of the target also plays a role in this process.
2. Source Characteristics: The major source characteristics are expertise, trustworthiness and attractiveness. The credibility of a perceived message has been found to be a key variable here (Hovland & Weiss, 1951); if one reads a report on health and believes it comes from a professional medical journal, one may be more easily persuaded than if one believes it is from a popular newspaper. Some psychologists have debated whether this is a long-lasting effect and Hovland and Weiss (1951) found the effect of telling people that a message came from a credible source disappeared after several weeks (the so-called "sleeper effect"). Whether there is a sleeper effect is controversial. Received wisdom is that if people are informed of the source of a message before hearing it, there is less likelihood of a sleeper effect than if they are told a message and then told its source.
3. Message Characteristics: The nature of the message plays a role in persuasion. Sometimes presenting both sides of a story is useful to help change attitudes.
4. Cognitive Routes: A message can appeal to an individual's cognitive evaluation to help change an attitude. In the central route to persuasion the individual is presented with the data and motivated to evaluate the data and arrive at an attitude changing conclusion. In the peripheral route to attitude change, the individual is encouraged to not look at the content but at the source. This is commonly seen in modern advertisements that feature celebrities. In some cases, doctors and experts are used. In other cases film stars are used for their attractiveness.

Attitude in the workplace

When it comes to Human Resource Management and recruiting, in recent years hire for attitude became a well known mantra. Several commercial tests such as the LAB Profile, iWAM and PAPI were developed to measure work Attitude and motivation, e.g. for pre-employment testing.

Attitude measurement

Main article: Attitude measure

Workers in attitude research

• Icek Ajzen

Attitudes amonsgst groups

• Adolescent attitudes
• Adult attitudes
• Child attitudes
• Client attitudes
• Consumer attitudes
• Counsellor attitudes

Attitudes towards groups

• [[Aged (atttitudes towards)}}
• Disabled (attitudes towards

Attitudes towards concepts

• Aging (attitudes towards)
• Childrearing attitudes
• Community attitudes
• Computer attitudes
• Death Attitudes

See also

• Allophilia
• Cognitive dissonance
• Elaboration likelihood model
• List of thinking-related topics
• Propositional attitude
• Social psychology
• Decision-making

Additional material

Books

• Ajzen, I. (1988) Attitudes, Personality and Behaviour, Milton Keynes: Open University Press.

Papers

• Google Scholar
• Abelson, R.P. (1976) Script processing in attitude formation and decision making. In: J.S. Carroll and J.W. Payne (eds) Cognition and Social Behaviour, Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
• Ajzen, I. and Fishbein, M. (1977) Attitude-behaviour relationships: a theoretical analysis and review of empirical research, Psychological Bulletin 84: 888-918.
• Ajzen, I. and Fishbein, M. (1980) Understanding Attitudes and Predicting Social Behaviour, Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.
• Ajzen, 1., Timko, C. and White, J.B. (1982) Self-monitoring and the attitude-behaviour relation, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 42: 426-35.