Explicit vs. Implicit Attitudes: Cognitive Dissonance

• Attitudes and Attitude Change, PSYC-2700, Lecture 5, Winter 2025

Today's Agenda

• What is an Attitude?
• The nature of attitudes
• Explicit and implicit attitudes
• When attitudes predict behaviour
• Attitude Change
• Resisting persuasive messages
• Cognitive Dissonance
• Wrap-Up

Today's Learning Objectives

• Differentiate between different types of attitudes
• Explain when attitudes predict behaviour
• Recognize how people, advertisements can attempt to change attitudes and/or behaviour
• Describe cognitive dissonance and predict when and how people might try to reduce it

What is an Attitude?

• An evaluation of a person, object, or idea
• Can be positive, negative, or both (ambivalence)
• Can also be neutral
• Attitudes have three components (sources):
• Affective component: Emotional reactions
• Cognitive component: Thoughts and beliefs
• Behavioural component: Actions and observable behaviour

Affectively-Based attitude

• Does not result from rational examination of issues
• Not governed by logic
• Reasoned arguments don't really have a big influence
• Can stem from important personal or moral values
• Trying to change affective attitudes can challenge people's moral values

Cognitively-Based Attitudes

• Focus on objective facts/merits/properties, the pluses and minuses, etc.
• Attitude is determined by the balance of positives and negatives
• People can feel positively about something or someone (positive affective attitude), even if with negative beliefs about it or them (negative cognitive attitude)
• e.g., dating the “bad boy”

Behaviorally-Based Attitudes

• Stems from people's observations of how they behave toward something or someone
• Ties to self-perception theory

Type of Attitude related to Valence

• When attitudes are negative toward a particular group, they often have a stronger Cognitive basis
• When a group is believed to threaten a person's value system or is seen as competition for resources
• Immigrants and atheists displacing white Christians in US?
• When attitudes are positive toward a particular group, they often have a stronger Affective basis

Explicit and Implicit Attitudes

• Explicit attitudes are consciously endorsed and easily reported
• Implicit attitudes are involuntary, uncontrollable, and more difficult to verbalize (unconscious?)
• Possible that people are aware of their implicit attitudes, at least sometimes, if they focus
• Implicit and explicit attitudes towards Coke and Pepsi are more strongly correlated when participants are instructed to focus on their feeling towards Coke and Pepsi than when they are asked to think about why they prefer Coke or Pepsi (Gawronski & LeBell, 2008)
• Explicit attitudes are usually assessed with scales
• Please rate your class on the following dimensions
• Implicit attitudes are usually assessed in other ways:
• Body language, physiological responses
• The Implicit Association Test (IAT)
• The name-letter task, etc.

The IAT Implicit Association Test

• Relies on cognitive interference from suppressing “incorrect" responses (like the Stroop effect)
• Categorizing judgments of words or images (5 blocks)
• Concept Judgments
• Liberal versus Conservative
• Canadian versus Foreign
• Caucasian versus African-Origin
• Attribute Judgments
  • Good (e.g., marvelous, superb)
  • Bad (e.g., tragic, horrible)
• Block 1 is to learn how to categorize a concept with gay people and straight people
• Block 2 is to learn how to make attribute judgments with good and bad
• Block 3 is concept – attribute judgment pairing #1 between gay people/good and straight people/bad.
• Block 4 is learning new locations of the concepts
• Block 5 is concept – attributes judgment pairing #2 with straight people/good and gay people/bad
• To get at implicit attitudes find the reaction time difference between Block 3 and Block 5
  • If you favor Straight people over Gay people you should respond faster to Block 5 (Straight people paired with good) than to Block 3 (Straight people paired with bad)
• The IAT can also examine the rate of errors
• Measuring IAT measures associations between concepts and positive or negative valence.
• It measures the strength of unconscious stereotypes and implicit Self-Esteem Criticisms:
• Validity?
• It predicts behaviour (independent of explicit measures)
• May be contaminated by familiarity
• Cultural knowledge vs. personal endorsement
• Particularly useful for predicting behaviour in socially sensitive contexts (e.g. discrimination)

The Name-Letter task

• Based on Name-Letter Effect
• People tend to favor letters in their name over other letters in the alphabet
• People rate each letter of the alphabet -“How aesthetically pleasing is this letter?"
• The degree that people favor name initials over other letters in the alphabet predicts:
• Self-esteem
• Depression
• Romantic satisfaction and longevity (LeBel & Campbell, 2009)

When do Attitudes Predict Behavior?

• The theory of planned behavior claims that the best predictor of planned, deliberate behavior is Intention
• Intentions are determined by Specific attitude(s) toward the behavior.
• Intentions are determined by Subjective norms with perceptions of the attitudes of others
• Intentions are determined by Perceived behavioral control.

Attitude Change

• Attitudes don't always predict our behavior, but people will try to change our attitudes and hope that the behavior they want will follow Persuasive communication:
• Some medium of communication that advocates a particular point of view
• Ads provide an example of persuasive communication in everyday life
• The Yale Attitude Change Approach (1950s) suggests that whether people change their attitudes is about "Who said what to whom"
• Source of the communication
• Nature of the communication
• Nature of the audience
• Communication can have more persuasion when the source delivering are perceived as:
• Credible
• Trustworthy
• Attractive
• Likeable
• The communication itself is more persuasive when presenting a case that
• Does not seem designed to influence attitudes
• Presents both sides of the argument
• Refutes the arguments that oppose the view
• Presents a longer argument
• People will be more persuaded if they are:
• Distracted during the conversation
• Having moderate self-esteem
• Younger (18 to 25)

Processing Persuasive Communications

• Elaboration Likelihood Model (Petty & Cacioppo)
• People can be influenced by “what is said” and “how it is being said” WHAT IS BEING SAID with
• Validity
• Logic
• Strength of arguments etc And/or HOW IT IS BEING SAID
• Credibility
• Attractiveness
• Length of argument etc
• The effectiveness of one type of persuasion as compared to the other varies depending on the motivation and ability of the audience to pay attention and process the persuasive communication.
• When motivation and ability are high people reflect on the merits of the argument using the Central Route (what is being said)
• When motivation and ability are low people use mental shortcuts and surface characteristics using the Peripheral Route (how it is being said)
• Using Fear as an attitude change tactic will only work in moderate amounts, and will motivate people to pay attention.

Advertising

• The general idea is that Advertising works on everyone, excluding ourselves
• Research indicates that when a product is advertised, sales tend to increase.
• The impact of advertising is generally small
• Media messages are much less impactful than real-world interaction
• It's hard to make someone buy something they hate
• The type of ad that works best depends on the basis of the attitude:
• Affectively-based attitudes benefit from emotion use
• Cognitively-based attitudes benefit from rational arguments

Subliminal Messages

• Subliminal message: Words or pictures intended to persuade, that are not consciously perceived
• Evidence does not support the idea that subliminal messages in advertising in everyday life exerts influence over consumers' purchases
• In some rare cases, subliminally priming people with certain products can alter their behavior (Fitzsimons et al, 2008)

Resisting Persuasive Messages

• People have tendency to resist persuasive messages by warning people in advance that someone will try to change their attitude
• Attitude inoculation:
  • Make people immune to attitude change attempts by exposing them to "small doses" of weak arguments for that position
  • Make them defend their position

What is Cognitive Dissonance?

• Cognitive dissonance are feelings of discomfort caused by the realization that your behavior is inconsistent with your attitudes, or that you hold two (or more) conflicting attitudes
• Dissonance is about feeling conflicted
• Often occurs when people do something that makes them feel stupid or immoral
• The discomfort of dissonance motivates people to try and reduce it

Reducing cognitive dissonance

• Change cognition(s) to be more in order with the dissonant behavior
• Change behavior to be more in order with the dissonant cognition
• Add new

Post-decision dissonance

• Simply making a decision can trigger cognitive dissonance
• This occurs when people enhance the attractiveness of the thing people chose, and devalue the thing(s) people rejected
• The need to reduce post-decision dissonance is stronger when the decision is more permanent
• Post-decision dissonance can occur when making more decisions
  • If people act immorally, they may change their value system to support that decision
  • E.g., "Once a cheater always a cheater"

Justification of Effort

• People tend to evaluate things more positively when they expend effort to get it
• People like things more BECAUSE people put in effort to obtain them.
• Wasting effort for little or no reward makes people feel foolish
• In order to avoid dissonance, people evaluate rewards more positively when expending effort to get it.
• Aronson & Mills (1959) confirmed the justification of the effort, and it has implications on hazing.

Justifying Dissonance

• Experiencing dissonance and motivation to reduce dissonance is partly a matter of attributions
• External justification: -- Explaining dissonant behavior in terms of things outside of your control
  • E.g., to get a reward, to avoid hurting someone's feelings
• This does not contribute to unpleasant feelings of discomfort Internal justification:
• If people can't find an external reason for dissonant behavior, they attribute it to themselves
• People try to reduce discomfort by changing something about themselves (e.g., attitudes, behavior)

Counter-Attitudinal Advocacy

• This occurs when people express an opinion or attitude that counters their private beliefs or feelings
• If people can identify external justification, they experience no dissonance and don't change their attitudes
• If people can't find external justification, they find or create internal justification -- To reduce the dissonance produced by the internal attribution people come to believe the counter-attitudinal opinion or attitude that they expressed

Power of Mild Punishment

• The key to lasting attitude change when wanting someone to stop behavior is Mild punishment.
• Severe punishment provides too much external justification.

Justifying Bad Deeds

• According to cognitive dissonance theory, when people hurt someone they sometimes come to dislike or hate that person more
  • Justifies the cruelty
  • E.g., Dehumanizing victims of war

Summary

• Attitudes stem from affect, cognitions, and behaviors
• Specific behaviors are best predicted with specific attitudes
• Whether or not persuasive messages influence attitudes and/or behavior depends on many factors
• Attitude change can occur through cognitive dissonance

MIDTERM

• Monday, Feb 10th from 5:30 – 7:30
• Readings: Chapters 1 – 6 Lectures: Lectures 1-5
• 100 MC questions

Explore the contrast between explicit and implicit attitudes, and delve into cognitive dissonance theory. Understand internal and external justifications for behavior. Explore methods of attitude assessment.