Understanding Attitudes: A Deep Dive

• Attitudes are evaluations of a person, object, or idea

Tripartite Model of Attitudes

• An attitude is a single entity with three components:
• Cognitive: ideas and beliefs about the attitude object
• Affective (emotional): feelings and emotions toward the object
• Behavioral: action tendencies toward the object or information concerning past behaviors or behavioral intentions

Functions of Attitudes

• Attitudes serve several functions for individuals
• Ego-defensive function: protect oneself from acknowledging basic truths about themselves or harsh realities
• Knowledge function: summarize information, allowing for rapid processing and influencing later retrieval of information from memory
• Value-expressive function: express values and personal identities
• Social-adjustive function: help fit into desirable social groups and interact smoothly with peers

Moral Foundations Theory

• Several innate psychological systems form the foundations of intuitive ethics which guide reactions to events
• These foundations include:
• Care: Underlies virtues of kindness, gentleness, and nurturance
• Fairness: Generates ideas of justice, rights, and autonomy
• Loyalty: Underlies virtues of patriotism and self-sacrifice for the group
• Authority: Underlies virtues of leadership and followership, including deference to legitimate authority and respect for traditions
• Purity (or sanctity): Underlies the idea that the body is a temple, desecrated by immoral activities, contaminants, and religious notions of striving for an elevated, less carnal, more noble way
• Liberty: Centers on feelings of reactance and resentment people feel toward those who dominate them and restrict their liberty

Application of Moral Foundations Theory

• Understanding political conflict between liberals and conservatives
• Encouraging pro-environmental attitudes and behaviors by appealing to the values and foundations underlying the message recipients' attitudes
• Potential applications for reducing vaccine hesitancy

Research on Moral Foundations

• Care and fairness foundations are not significantly associated with vaccine hesitancy
• Purity and liberty foundations are associated with vaccine hesitancy
• Communications in clinical settings and public messages are more effective when they address purity and liberty foundations

Attributes of Attitudes

• Pervasive, relatively enduring, and learned, making them changeable and predictive of behavior

Attitude-Behavior Relationship

• A study (LaPiere, 1934) suggests a fair conclusion of prejudicial attitudes are unrelated to discriminatory behavior

Factors Affecting the Attitude-Behavior Relation

• Measurement of Attitudes & Behavior
• Specificity Problem
• Self-Awareness
• Competing Pressures

Theory of Reasoned Action/Planned Behavior (Fishbein & Ajzen, 1975)

• Specific Attitude Toward the Behavior
• Subjective Norms: Beliefs about how important others will view the behavior
• Perceived Control: Perceived ease of performing the behavior
• Intention impacts behavior

Factors Affecting Persuasion

• Communication Source (e.g., attractiveness, credibility)
• Audience (e.g., IQ, self-esteem, age, distraction, mood)
• Nature of Communication (e.g., seems deliberately designed to influence?, one-sided vs. two-sided)

Elaboration Likelihood Model (Petty & Cacioppo, 1986)

• Two routes to persuasion:
• Central (High Elaboration): Incoming message and motivation/ability to elaborate
• Peripheral Route (Low Elaboration): Heuristic cues are influential, leading to temporary attitude change

Central Route Processing

• Argument quality is influential, leading to stable attitude change
• The "really close shave" study (Petty, Cacioppo, & Schumann, 1983) exemplifies this

Heuristic Cues

• Celebrity endorsement makes a big difference under low but not high involvement
• Strong arguments make a big difference under high but not low involvement

Resisting Persuasion

• Factors that affect resistance to social influence:
• Knowledge
• Prior attitude strength
• Ability to generate counterarguments
• Central route persuasion/ability to discriminate strong from weak arguments
• Reactance
• Forewarning
• Practice

Attitude Inoculation

• The process of making people immune to attempts to change their attitudes by exposing them to small doses of the arguments against their position (McGuire & Papageorgis, 1961)