MARK2051 Lecture Notes - Lecture 9: Spreading Activation, Social Text, Attitude Change
Lecture 9: Attitude & Personality
What is Attitude?
Cognitive: relatively enduring evaluation of an object that can affect an
individual’s behaviour
Behavioural: a predisposition to respond in a favourable or unfavourable
manner toward a class of objects
Model of Attitude
Components of attitude:
1. Cognitive (beliefs and knowledge)
a. Objective (fact about an object)
b. Subjective (evaluative)
2. Affective (emotional response and feelings)
a. Can be vague and general and made without cognitive
information
b. An associated feeling based off cognitive information
i. However, different people will have different associated
feelings from the same cognitive information (due to
unique motivations and personalities, past experiences,
reference groups etc)
3. Behavioural (tendency of the attitude holder to respond in a certain
manner towards an attitude object or stimulus)
Generalisation overlooks small differences in individual stimuli and leads to
same response for the whole class of stimuli. (concept learning)
Attitude Behaviour Link
Link between attitude and behaviour is based on notion of behavioural
control and response consistency. However, this is a complex link and is
subject to a number of moderators such as:
1. Situation
a. High involvement (Cognitive, affective, behavioural)
b. Hedonic situation (affective, behavioural, cognitive)
c. Low involvement (behavioural, affective, cognitive)
i. i.e. why free samples are given out
2. Social influence
3. Strength of the learned response
4. External incentives to behaviour
School of thoughts:
1. Attitude drives behaviour.
2. The shopping situation drives behaviour more.
Theory of Planned behaviour recognises that there are social influences on
behaviour.
Behavioural Control Model of Attitude:
Cognitive, affective response + Social norm + habit/incentive à intention à
behaviour.
The marketing implication is that when you try and change attitudes, don’t
forget to structure the situation so that the incentives are consistent with the
behaviour you are trying to promote, and that you are promoting the attitude
as a social norm.
Attitude Changes
In order to change attitude, you must changed how information is spread.
This is based off the Spreading Activation Model
• Associated units of information
• Length of associations depend on recency, primacy and familiarity
• Favourability: casual relation of an object to achievement of the
consumer’s goal
• Intensity: strength of association between units of information
Attitude change results from change in any of the three components of
attitude:
1. Cognitive
2. Affective
3. Behavioural
4. Mere exposure or familiarity effect
Persuasion:
• Source (uses modelling of responses (copying them) and inference
from secondary cues (what they are promoting made them famous etc)
o Credibility
o Attractiveness
• Message structure
o One sided vs. two sided arguments (first make arguments
against your own thesis)
o Recency vs. primacy
• Audience
o Need for cognition (some people need rational, cognitive
reasoning)
Document Summary
Cognitive: relatively enduring evaluation of an object that can affect an individual"s behaviour. Behavioural: a predisposition to respond in a favourable or unfavourable manner toward a class of objects. Generalisation overlooks small differences in individual stimuli and leads to same response for the whole class of stimuli. (concept learning) Link between attitude and behaviour is based on notion of behavioural control and response consistency. School of thoughts: attitude drives behaviour, the shopping situation drives behaviour more. Theory of planned behaviour recognises that there are social influences on behaviour. Cognitive, affective response + social norm + habit/incentive intention behaviour. In order to change attitude, you must changed how information is spread. This is based off the spreading activation model: associated units of information, length of associations depend on recency, primacy and familiarity, favourability: casual relation of an object to achievement of the consumer"s goal. Intensity: strength of association between units of information.
