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Lecture 2: Attitudes (Definition: [a positive, negative or mixed…

- - - - Correspondence
      - Strength
- - - - the most popular form is the Likert Scale: indicate on a multiple-point scale how strongly someone agrees or disagrees with each statement
      - Problems: susceptible to:
        
        the wording or order of questions,
        
        the context,
        
        honesty: wanting to make a good impression
        
        other extraneous factors.
        Assumes people honestly express true opinions
        
        Bogus pipeline:
        
        a phoney lie-detector device that is sometimes used to get respondents to give truthful answers to sensitive questions.
        
        Purports to record respondents’ true feelings physiologically
        
        Can increase honest responding
  - - - Problem: though behaviour might provide cues, might be conflicting explanations for the same behaviour (e.g. sometimes people nod their head to agree, other times people nod their head to be polite)
      - Problem: people monitor their behaviour. Physiological measures of arousal (heart rate, perspiration) reveal intensity of attitude but not whether it is positive or negative
        
        Measuring electrical activity in the brain
        
        Electroencephalograph (EEG) – Brain wave patterns normally triggered by inconsistency; increase more when a disliked or liked stimuli was presented after a string of some of the other
        
        MRI (e.g. studies on political attitudes show activity in the amygdala – a structure associated with emotion)
        
        Facial electromyograph (EMG):
        
        records facial muscle activity associated with emotions and attitudes: Certain muscles contract when we’re happy, others when we’re sad.
        
        Can record subtle changes observes may not notice
        
        Implicit Association Test (IAT):
        
        a covert measure of unconscious attitudes derived from the speed at which people respond to pairings of concepts – e.g. black or white with good or bad
        
        it takes longer to pair disliked things with positive words/liked things with negative words than disliked things with negative words/liked
        
        Social psychologists debate over what IAT scores mean, how attitudes that are revealed are formed and then changed, how these attitudes may predict or influence behaviour, how they differ from explicit attitudes, etc.
        
        Meta-analysis (Greenwald et al., 2009) concludes that:
        
        Implicit attitudes are generally less predictive of behaviour than explicit attitudes.
        
        For socially sensitive topics – for which people often conceal or distort their self-reports – IAT measures are better
- - - - Assumes that we do not always process communications in the same way – can involve either thinking critically about the contents of a message or not
      - Peripheral route
        
        No careful thought about the message
        
        Influenced by superficial cues
      - Central route
        
        Careful thought about the message
        
        Influenced by the strength and quality of the message
      - Route taken depends on whether one is willing and able to scrutinise the information contained in the message
      - Route used dependent on:
        
        source
        
        message
        
        audience
        
        Source
        
        Credibility:
        
        competence
        
        trustworthiness
        
        Likeability:
        
        similarity
        
        physical attractiveness
        
        message
        
        interaction between source and message
        
        audience
    - - Hovland & collegues (1940s & 50s): first to study persuasion systemically
        
        For persuasive messages to have influence, recipients must learn its content and be motivated to accept it
        
        People can be persuaded only by the argument they attend to, comprehend and retain
      - McGuire (1969)