PSYC1030 Lecture Notes - Lecture 4: Theory Of Reasoned Action, Behaviorism, Statistical Hypothesis Testing
PSYC1030 Lecture Four: Attitudes
• Since WWII there has been a lot of interest in how attitudes are formed, what effect
they have and how they can be changed, because they thought it might be particularly
useful in influencing the war effort. Propaganda was used by the government to get
the public to support the war efforts from home by getting them to change their
behaviours
e.g. drive less to save fuel, or invest their money in a war bond, also to get other
people in enemy countries to try and rise against their own governments
• It was hoped that understanding attitudes it would help to understand a whole range
of social behaviours
e.g. discrimination, aggressing, voting patterns, religious activities
• Recently however, the effort has been on the application of what is known about
attitudes to understand why people behave the way they do
e.g. give up smoking, exercising regularly, how political campaigns can influence
voters, what makes advertising more effective and what the public thinks about
important topics like climate change
• Sometimes people use the term 'attitude' to refer to whether someone has a positive or
negative personality, as in they have a 'bad attitude'. Or classify them as values. But
that's not the case here.
• An attitude researcher Russell Fazio published a paper (1986), saying "When we talk
about an attitude, we're talking about an association between a behaviours or object
and an evaluation."
• Himmelfarb and Eagly (1974) suggests that people can think about an attitude as
having three components: beliefs, feelings, and behavioural tendencies, also referred
to as the Tri-partite Model
e.g. A man has a positive attitude towards Bollywood films. In terms of his beliefs he
believes the films are entertaining, in terms of his feelings, watching the films makes
him feel good, and his positive attitude may include behavioural tendencies, he would
be willing to watch Bollywood films
• Values are the judgements made by individuals about what is important in life, they're
broad and abstract, and not necessarily linked to a particular thing or behaviour
e.g. someone might value achievement in life
Attitudes, however, by definition are linked to a specific thing
e.g. if someone values achievement or doing well in life, they might have an attitude of
doing well in this course
• Opinions are also sometimes confused with attitudes, and opinion is a verbal
expression of an attitude, it's what people say their attitude is. The difference between
opinion and attitude then, is that sometimes what people say doesn't always match
what they think. Sometimes to manage the impression people create, they express a
different opinion, due to pressure, dear of sanctions, or because they aren't thinking
about their actual attitudes at the particular time
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• Attitudes are also sometimes confused with schemas, schemas being the mental
representations of how things are, and don’t have any feeling component like a
schema.
Attitude-Behaviour Relations
• Marketing relies on several ideas, one of which is that if they can change the attitude
of someone, then they can change their behaviour
• In 1934, LaPiere tested whether attitude where related to behaviour, he didn’t expect a
particularly positive result (he was travelling with several Chinese people, visiting
numerous hotels, his partners asking for service, and it was the 1930s) when they
showed up at the establishments 99% of places served them, when calling ahead, 92%
said they wouldn't serve them. This shows that the behaviour and the attitudes of the
people working at these places were conflicting. The paper was criticised, however,
because LaPiere wasn't researching the same people in the different situations
• There is a distinguishing lack in the relationship between behaviours and attitudes
• Later research had suggested that sometimes attitudes can predict behaviour but its
somewhat complicated. It matters how attitudes and behaviours are measured, even if
being measured from the same person, attitude and behaviour needs to be measure in
the same amount of detail.
e.g. When asking people if they recycle, it's probably not a good idea to measure their
attitude towards saving the environment, this is because there is a relatively specific
behaviour, recycling, and measuring it with a general attitude, saving the environment
• According to Fishbein and Ajzen (1974), attitudes and behaviour will be related when
they are measured in ways that are similar or compatible, the Principle of
Compatibility. Four things need to be taken into account to do so.
-the target, or focus of the behaviour
-the action, the behaviour itself
-the time, which is when the behaviour is enacted
-the context, or situation that the behaviour is enacted in
e.g. measuring the relationship between attitude towards recycling and recycling
behaviour
to measure the attitude ask, "to what extent do you support recycling all paper, tins,
and plastic over the next two weeks in your home?" And two weeks later, to measure
behaviour ask "over the last two weeks, to what extent did you recycle all paper, tins,
and plastic in your home?"
-the target is 'all paper, tins, and plastic'
-the action is 'recycling'
-the time is 'over the next or last two weeks'
-the context is 'your home'
Using the Principle of Compatibility, one would expect a specific attitude, such as the
example, will predict a single behaviour better than a general attitude (Davidson and
Jaccard, 1979)
• It is also predicted that when general attitude measure is used, then a general
behavioural index which is just a collection of behaviours (Weigel and Newman, 1976)
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• Another reason why attitudes sometimes are not a good predictor of behaviour is
because other variables can become important in the relationship between attitudes
and behaviour
e.g. social norms also contribute to behaviour. One person thinking one thing and
their friends with a different opinion, the individual may not have behaved in the way
their attitude would suggest, but instead went along with their friends' opinions so
they would fit in
• To further complicate things, the link between hearing a persuasive argument and
changing ones behaviour is not so simple and involves many steps. In McGuire's Chain
of Persuasion Model after someone sends a persuasive message in your direction, you
have to attend to the message, and comprehend the message, before you can even
change your attitude and yield to the message, but you still have to retain that
message in memory in order to act on it. All these steps have to happen successfully
for a persuasive message to have an effect on your behaviour, if any one of them isn't
successful, there's no behaviour change.
• One of the reasons often given for the weak relationship between attitudes and
behaviour is that there are other variables that are important in the behaviour-attitude
relationship. One being the theory of reasoned action (Fishbein and Ajzen, 1974), the
best determinant of someone engaging in a behaviour or not was their intention to
engage in that behaviour or not, and they saw attitude fitting into this model by
influencing people's intention. And so, someone's attitude is the positive or negative
feelings towards engaging in the behaviour. In conjunction to this, they also
recognised the important of social pressure, where people are vulnerable to what their
friends or family think shouldn't or should be done. Another determinate of intention
was the subjective norm, the perceived social pressure to engage or not engage in the
behaviour
• Attitudes do predict behaviours just not directly, and through intention
• Another way was through behavioural control. The sense of absolute ability to engage
in the behaviour, a combination of personal confidence but also structural factors that
may prevent someone from engaging in a certain behaviour. In some instances, where
the perception of behavioural control is accurate, and it becomes actual behavioural
control, it can influence directly into terms of behaviour.
e.g. Someone think blood donation is a fantastic thing to do, so they have a positive
attitude. Their friends and family think the same thing. But when getting to the
perceived behavioural control, there's not a donation centre near them, so it doesn't
matter how positively they feel about it, they can't actually engage it in due to there
being no way to conduct the behaviour. Until their elements change, there's no real
point in having formed the intention because the behaviour can't be enacted
• Attitudes and behaviour don't happen in isolation, they're actually in a social context.
There's also real-world limits on what sort of behaviours that might be able to be
engaged in at any one time
• Many people also have highly positive attitudes towards certain things, have the
tools/circumstances to enact the behaviour included with that, and they just don’t. In
doing so, many people think of an implementation intention, creating if-then plans, it
gets a person to think through some of the barriers they may encounter trying to
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