components and measurement of attitudes
attitude
An evaluation of an object in a positive or negative fashion that includes three components: affect, cognition, and behavior.
attitudes can't always predict behavior
Many people are in favor of the notion of having a designated driver and believe it's wrong to drive under the influence. But many people also have a favorable attitude toward drinking and having fun with friends, and they prefer not to spoil others' fun by monitoring or curtailing their drinking.
you might be dying to share your hilarious commentary about the movie with the person next to you, but let's hope you refrain from doing so because you recognize that it just isn't done and that others--probably including the person next to you!--would disapprove.
cognitive dissonance theory
people are troubled by inconsistency among their thoughts, sentiments, and actions and that they will expend psychological energy to restore consistency. More specifically, he argued that an aversive emotional state--dissonance--is aroused whenever people experience inconsistency between two cognitions.
Festinger 1957
spt
people don't always come to know their own attitudes by introspecting about what they think or how they feel about something. Rather, they often look outward at their behavior and the context in which it occurred and from there infer what their attitudes must be. Self-perception works just like social perception. People come to understand themselves and their attitudes in the same way that they come to understand others and their attitudes.
system justification theory
believing that the world is or should be fair yet seeing abundant evidence of inequality can generate ideological dissonance.
three components of attitudes
affect - emotion
cognitions - thoughts
behaviors
at the core of attitude is a positive/negative response to an object
Introspecting About the Reasons for Our Attitudes
It turns out that coming up with the (wrong) reasons for an attitude you have can mislead you about what your attitude actually is.
decisions and dissonance
all hard decisions cause some feelings of dissonance. Because the decision is hard, the rejected alternative must have some desirable features, the chosen alternative must have some undesirable features--or both.
clear cut vs vague attitudes
Dissonance reduction processes are more likely to be activated when people engage in behavior that is inconsistent with a clear-cut attitude, such as the attitude many people have toward the long-standing issue of gun control. Self-perception processes are more apt to come into play for vaguely held attitudes, such as the attitudes people have about relatively mundane things, such as sele sticks.
terror management theory
The theory that people deal with the potentially crippling anxiety associated with the inevitability of death by striving for symbolic immortality through preserving valued cultural worldviews and by believing they have lived up to their culture's standards.
how to measure attitude
Likert scale - Rensis Likert
1 = strongly disagree, 7 = strongly agree
which group was able to accurately evaluate their current relationship status
The attitudes of participants in the first group, who evaluated their relationships without considering their reasons, were much more accurate predictors of their current relationship status than were the attitudes of participants who had introspected about their reasons for liking their partner (T. D. Wilson et al., 1984). Thinking about why we like someone can mislead us in terms of our true, full attitude toward that person, with the result that the attitude we report after generating reasons is not a very good predictor of our subsequent behavior.
rationlizing decisions and reducing dissonance
After placing a bet at the track people are likely to concentrate on the positive features of the horse they chose and to downplay any negatives. This rationalization process gives them greater confidence in the choice they made.
self preception and dissonance
self-perception may play a role in generating the effects in some dissonance experiments, evidence indicates that there is often a motivational component as well. Self-perception appears to account for attitude change when attitudes are weak or unclear to begin with, and more motivated dissonance reduction is invoked when attitudes are more strongly held.
response latency
The amount of time it takes to respond to a stimulus, such as an attitude question.
predicting specific and general behaviors
Studies have shown that highly specific attitudes tend to do a better job of predicting specific behaviors, and general attitudes typically do a better job of predicting how a person behaves "in general" (Ajzen, 1987).
effort justifiction
if you pay a high price for something--in dollars, time, or effort--and it turns out to be disappointing, you'll probably experience dissonance. As a result, you're likely to devote mental energy to justifying what you've done.
sensations
Bodily sensations are oen incorporated into people's judgments about an object or appraisals of a situation.
implicit attitude measure
An indirect measure of attitudes that doesn't involve a self-report.
induced/forced compliance
Subtly compelling people to behave in a manner that is inconsistent with their beliefs, attitudes, or values in order to elicit dissonance and therefore a change in their original attitudes and values.