Understanding Attitudes: Tripartite Model & Functions

• Attitudes involve an evaluation of a person, object, or idea.

Tripartite Model of Attitudes

• The tripartite model posits that 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

• Ego-defensive function: Protecting oneself from acknowledging basic truths about themselves or harsh realities.
• Knowledge function: Attitudes summarize information.
• They allow rapid information processing.
• Attitudes influence the ability to retrieve information from memory.
• Value-expressive function: Attitudes serve as a means for individuals to express their values and personal identities.
• Social-adjustive function: Attitudes help people fit into desirable social groups and interact smoothly with peers.

Moral Foundations Theory (Haidt and colleagues)

• Suggests innate psychological systems form the basis of intuitive ethics, guiding reactions to events.
• Key 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, and avoidance of immoral activities and contaminants.
• Liberty: Centers on feelings of reactance and resentment toward those who dominate and restrict liberty.

Applications of Moral Foundations Theory

• Understanding political conflict: Applications to understanding conflict between those with liberal versus conservative political orientations.
• Persuasion: Being more persuasive by addressing the values and foundations underlying the message recipients' attitudes.
• Pro-environmental attitudes: Encouraging pro-environmental attitudes and behaviors.
• Vaccine hesitancy: Research indicates care and fairness foundations are not significantly associated with vaccine hesitancy, but purity and liberty foundations are.
• Communications in clinical settings and public messages may be more effective if they address purity and liberty foundations.

Attitudes and Behavior

• Attitudes can be pervasive, relatively enduring, learned, and are thus possibly changeable.
• Attitudes may predict behavior.
• A study (LaPiere, 1934) suggests prejudicial attitudes are unrelated to discriminatory behavior.

Factors Affecting the Attitude-Behavior Relationship

• 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
• Behavior

Persuasion

• Factors Affecting Persuasion:
• Communication Source: E.g., attractiveness, credibility.
• Audience: E.g., IQ, self-esteem, age, distraction, mood.
• Nature of Communication: E.g., Is it deliberately designed to influence?, one-sided vs. two-sided.
• Elaboration Likelihood Model (Petty & Cacioppo, 1986):
• Central Route: High elaboration.
• Peripheral Route: Low elaboration.

Elaboration Likelihood Model (continued)

• Central route processing: argument quality is influential.
• Peripheral route processing: heuristic cues are influential.
• Central route processing leads to stable attitude change.
• Peripheral route processing leads to temporary attitude change.
• "The really close shave study" (Petty, Cacioppo, & Schumann, 1983) showed that 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

• Resistance to social influence is affected by factors including:
• Knowledge
• Prior attitude strength
• Ability to generate counterarguments
• Central route persuasion/ability to discriminate strong from weak arguments.
• Reactance
• Forewarning
• Practice
• Attitude inoculation: Making people immune to attempts to change their attitudes by exposing them to small doses of the arguments against their position (McGuire & Papageorgis, 1961).