Transcript of Audio Lecture
Welcome to
lesson six, module one. Attitudes. In this module we’re going to
discuss what an attitude is and where it comes from.
Let’s move
on to slide two to begin. Attitudes are thought to have three components;
an affective component, a behavioral component, and a cognitive component.
We refer to these as the ABC’s of attitude. The affective component is
how you feel about something. The emotional part of how you evaluate an
object, a person, or a thing. A behavioral component is how you act toward
that thing. Remember in self-perception theory we said a lot of the way
we feel is based on how we behaved in the past, therefore the way we’ve
acted toward something or towards someone in the past makes up the
behavioral component of our attitude. And finally the cognitive
component. This encompasses all the information that you have, what you
know about that person. That policy, that attitude, that object.
Let’s move
on to slide three. Attitude formation. Self-perception theory is one way
in which attitudes are formed, that is you look at your behavior to infer
your attitude. This is especially true for attitudes that you’ve not
thought about much before. For example, if I ask what your attitude
towards Tide is. If Tide isn’t a big deal to you, then you probably haven’t
thought about it and you might look at your behavior. I didn’t buy it
last time, it was too expensive, or I use it everyday and looking at that
behavior, then infer your attitude is a 9 on a 10 point scale or a 3 on a
10 point scale. Foot in the door persuasion technique that uses
self-perception theory and relies on the attitudes are formed by looking
at your behavior. The foot in the door technique involves asking someone
for something small and then following that up with a larger request,
pointing out their previous compliance with the smaller one. So if you
come by and have someone sign a petition in favor of a specific policy and
then the next day or perhaps even a week later come by, remind them that
they had done this in the past, that is give them the behavior so that
they may infer their attitude. In the past you signed this petition
promoting this policy and now we’re asking for your vote in the upcoming
election. This would be an example of foot in the door. There is some
genetic evidence for attitude formation. Twin studies show that identical
twins, more so than fraternal twins, who have been reared apart, have
similar attitudes, including a similar religion, similar job satisfaction,
similar occupation, activities, and interests. I would ask you to question
this evidence very carefully. Perhaps it is not the fact that these
people have some sort of genetic component, but because they’ve been
treated very similarly by the world. For example perhaps their activities
are the same because they both happen to be very tall and we like for
people who are tall to play basketball and engage in other tall people
behaviors. Perhaps their job satisfaction is also related. Perhaps it’s
very high because people at work treat them well, because they have a
similar level of attractiveness. In fact, identical twins look very much
alike, therefore they’re likely to be treated very much alike in their
settings, even if those settings are in different parts of the country.
Let’s move
on to slide four. Measuring attitudes. One thing we can do is ask.
Using a Likert scale, simply ask folks what they feel about something.
How do you feel about Tide. One, you don’t like it at all, ten you like
it very much. The other way we can measure an attitude is look at a
behavior. Are people buying Tide, we may infer that they like it. If
they’re not buying it, we may infer that they do not care for Tide. We
can also use a recall or a thought listing method, that is if I have you
to recall as much as you can about a specific debate. What I will find is
that you will remember more from your side, that is, I should see more
things listed that have to do with your position and you’re likely to
counter-argue those things that you list that have to do with the opposite
solution and then I can simply count or surmise how positively or
negatively you felt about something by looking at the thoughts.
Let’s move
on to slide five. We can also use unobtrusive measures. We can use the
bogus pipeline for example to measure racism or other sensitive issues.
The bogus pipeline involves connecting someone to what they perceive to be
physiological measures, so we’ll look at heart rate, palm sweat and so
on. We then explain to them that in order to get a baseline test what
will need to happen is we need them to answer three questions, all of
which we already have the answers to. Think of questions as their age,
their address, their name, number of siblings and so on. Now the bogus
part means that the meter or some sort of light comes on when the person
lies. Now this meter or light is controlled by someone in another room
who is a confederate with the experiment. Because we already know the
answers to these questions, we tell them to tell the truth on 2 and lie on
1. This will allow us to get a base rate. They can choose whichever one
they like to lie about and not to tell us, but obviously we would already
know. Thus when the person lies, the experimenter in the other room flips
on the light. The person now believes that this is a very serious matter.
This machine works and will know when they’re lying. Therefore they tend
to be more honest later on and we believe they’re more honest because
they’re more likely to report attitudes that are not socially desirable.
Hidden items are another way to measure attitudes that may be more
sensitive. So inviting a series of racism items among a series of items
about other matters that are equally important but perhaps not quite so
politically charged. We can also look at reaction times, RTs, the speed of
response, how quickly someone is able to pair two things, the Implicit
Atitudes Test
uses this and you should try the IAT on your own time. Explicit attitudes
would be another way to measure attitudes. This is simply asking people
very directly how they feel about a variety of policies, issues or
objects.
Let’s move
on to slide six. When we’re measuring attitudes, there are several things
you need to be very aware of. One, are wording effects. Clearly I have
two examples about abortion that people might use depending on their
political bent to measure people’s attitudes towards abortion. The first
one is should a woman have the right to take the life of her unborn
child. The second is should a woman have the right to control her own
body. Clearly these questions, although they’re about similar issues,
will result in very different attitude ratings. There are also framing
effects. Advertisers know this, that is why you read that your meat is
75% lean or 98% lean as opposed to giving you the percentage of fat
involved; 25% for example. I did a study in my class several years ago
and I had people fill out a questionnaire that asked them how frequently
they brushed their teeth per day, one, two, three times, more than three
and so on. And then I asked how many of them had received their annual
checkup. What you see here are the people who received questionnaire A
and the people who received questionnaire B. Those receiving
questionnaire A said that about 70% or more had received their annual
checkup and brushed their teeth an average of 2.65 times per day.
However, those receiving questionnaire B reported that they brushed their
teeth only 2.3 times per day and only 66% had actually received an annual
checkup. What do you think the difference is between questionnaire A and
questionnaire B? It was really quite simple. In questionnaire A we just
asked them the question. We said who’s ever interested in dental hygiene,
please answer the following. For questionnaire B we said being honest is
really important, so please be honest and sincere when answering the
questions. So in some cases simply asking people to be honest will result
in a very different attitude than when they’re giving you an attitude that
maybe more socially desirable.
Let’s move
on to slide seven. We discussed a little bit about the wording of
questions but the order of questions is also very important. If I asked
you how satisfied you are with your marriage and then asked you how
satisfied you are with your life, I’ll get different satisfaction scores
for each of those than if I asked them in reverse order. If I asked about
your life satisfaction, that’s probably going to also include your
marriage if I ask it first, but if I’ve already asked about your marriage
satisfaction, then asked about your life satisfaction, your life
satisfaction scores probably going to correct for your marriage score
because I already have that information. Response options are also
important. We can use different kinds of scales, bipolar or unipolar. A
unipolar scale, negative to positive, would be an example. Now what’s the
midpoint of a negative to positive scale mean depends on the
interpretation of the person who’s reading the scale. Some people may see
this as neither good nor bad, neutral. Other people may see this as I
don’t care, I have no attitude, while some may just see it as less
positive or not quite negative. However, if you use the unipolar scale,
not positive/positive, then what you find as the midpoint is very clear,
it’s somewhere between not positive and positive and negative and neutral
are not available as options. Again, the top scale is the bipolar scale
and the bottom scale is the unipolar scale.
Let’s move on to slide
eight. One concern when measuring attitudes, especially
attitudes that are politically charged is social desirability. We could
do this two ways in order to take into account social desirability. One
is to measure social desirability and correlate it with our dependent
variable to determine if in fact people are answering these questions in a
way that is similar to the way they answered social desirability
questions. The second is to do a covariation analysis by measuring and
then discounting social desirability scores. So if we know that some part
of the reason people are answering the question they are, is due to social
desirability, we can covary that out and see if there’s any effects that
remain with our measured variable. On the next two slides, we see a list
of questions that have to do with social desirability specifically taken
from the Marlow Crown Scale. These are just meant to give you some idea
of what is meant by social desirability items. Let’s skip through those.
You can come back to them later and review them and move to slide eleven.
How are
attitudes formed. Learning theory might be one way in which attitudes are
formed. We know that if you’ve had direct experience with an attitude
object, you’ll have a stronger attitude. A series of condom studies have shown this. If you look at virgins, people who’ve never used
a condom simply because they’ve never had the opportunity, versus people
who have used a condom at least once, what you find is that there’s a
difference in attitude strengths so clearly virgins feel pretty positively
compared to non-virgins if you look at the attitude bar, that’s the bar on
the left. But if you look at the bar as looking at attitude strengths,
those more negative attitudes that those who’ve used a condom once have
are very strong, a 7 on a 7 point scale in fact.
Let’s move
on to slide twelve. Attitudes also serve different functions, that is
they serve a purpose for us. One purpose is knowledge. They allow us to
master the environment, that we know how we feel about snakes and spiders
and so on, then we allowed ourselves to not have to think about it every
time we encounter a snake or a spider. We have knowledge about how we
feel about that as well as knowledge about how we feel about ice cream and
other types of food or people. Also social identity is a function of
attitude. This is considered a value expressive function. By having a
current series of attitudes, you’re allowed to express your value system
to others and to yourself, allowing you to maintain a social identity. A
third function is the self-esteem function. Some attitudes serve to allow
us to have high or positive self-esteem. For example believing that things
that we’re bad at are not really important or believing that things we’re
good at are extremely important. There are some attitudes that serve a
combination of functions. Homophobic attitudes may be one example of
this. For some people they feel that their homophobic attitudes are
knowledge and allow them to master the environment by avoiding people who
may be homosexual. For others homophobic attitudes may be part of a
social identity. They’re expressing some value that is very negative
toward homosexuality and third it could serve as a self-esteem function,
especially for men who feel that feeling positively about homosexuals may
in fact undermine their own masculinity.
This
concludes lesson six, module one. Thank you.
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