PSYB10H3 Chapter Notes - Chapter 7: Russell Crowe, Likert Scale, Leon Festinger
Chapter 7: Attitudes, Behaviour, and Rationalization
• Attitudes can influence behaviour, and behaviour can influence attitudes
• People rationalize, so behaviour influences attitudes as well
• Which is stronger: the effect of attitudes on behaviour or the effect of behaviour on attitudes?
• It’s a difficult question to answer, but research has shown that the influence of attitudes on behaviour is a bit
weaker than most people suspect, and the influence of behaviour on attitudes is much stronger than most
suspect
• Give people a slight nudge to behave in a particular way, and their attitudes typically follow
• Many people who consider themselves environmentalists nonetheless drive gas-guzzling SUVs
• Driving a vehicle that is not fuel efficient can lead those who are concerned about the environment to
convince themselves that there is not much connection between fuel efficiency and air pollution or climate
change
• Research shows that attitudes are often surprisingly poor predictors of behaviour, but it also specifies the
circumstances in which they predict behaviour rather well
The Three Components of Attitudes
• Attitude: an evaluation of an object in a positive or negative fashion that includes the three elements of affect,
cognition, and behaviour
• Affect—how much people like or dislike an object
• Nearly all objects trigger some degree of positive or negative emotion, which constitutes the affective component
of attitudes
• Cognitions—thoughts that typically reinforce a person’s feelings
• These include knowledge and beliefs about the object, as well as associated memories and images
• Your attitude about a favourite city, for example, includes knowledge about its history and its most appealing
neighbourhoods and landmarks, as well as special times you’ve spent there
• Most generally, the affective evaluation of good versus bad is connected to a behavioural tendency to approach
versus avoid
• When specific attitudes are primed, people are more likely to act in ways consistent with the attitude
• Neuroscientific studies indicate that our attitudes activate particular regions in the brain—areas of the motor
cortex—that support specific actions
• Thus actions are associated with specific intentions and actions
Measuring Attitudes
• Researchers typically use survey questions to learn about people’s attitudes
• Likert scale: a numerical scale used to assess people’s attitudes; it includes a set of possible answers with labelled
anchors on each extreme
• E.g., 1 = never, 7 = always
• Traditional Likert scales sometimes fail to differentiate people with stronger and weaker attitudes
• Russell Fazio’s approach: to measure the accessibility of the attitude—how readily the attitude can be activated in
the individual’s mind, thereby guiding thought and behaviour
• Fazio and colleagues measure the accessibility of attitudes by assessing the time it takes the individual to respond
to the attitude question
• Response latency: the time it takes an individual to respond to a stimulus, such as an attitude question
• A second way to assess the strength and importance of a person’s attitude is to determine the centrality of the
attitude to the individual’s belief system
• To assess attitude centrality, researchers measure a variety of attitudes within a domain and calculate how
strongly each attitude is linked to the others
• Other ways of measuring attitudes do not rely on explicit self-reports
• Implicit attitude measures: indirect measures of attitudes that do not involve self-report
• Used when there is reason to believe that people may be unwilling or unable to report their true attitudes
• Implicit measures allow researchers to tap automatic attitudes—that is, people’s immediate evaluative reactions
that they may not be conscious of, or that may conflict with their consciously endorsed attitudes
• Researchers also sometimes use nonverbal measures of attitudes, such as degree of physical closeness
• Can also measure physiological indicators, such as the increased heart rate associated with fear
• Box 7.1 describes how patterns of brain activity recorded from the surface of the scalp reveal the strength of
people’s positive and negative attitudes
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Predicting Behaviour from Attitudes
• Richard LaPiere in the early 1930s spent two years touring the United States with a young Chinese couple
• Denied service by only one of the 250 establishments they visited
• LaPiere wrote to all of the establishments they had visited and asked whether their policy was to serve
“Orientals”
• Approximately 90 percent of those who responded said they would not
• Anti-Chinese prejudice was rather robust
• Why do we think that people’s attitudes are strong predictors of their behaviour when empirical studies reveal that
they are not?
• Part of the reason is that we see plenty of evidence every day that attitudes and behaviour go together
• But this evidence only tells us that if people behave in a certain way, they are likely to have a positive attitude
toward that behaviour
• This does not mean, however, that people with a positive attitude toward a behaviour are likely to behave in a
manner consistent with their attitude
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• What is not so obvious in everyday life are the many instances of people with positive attitudes toward
bowling who do not bowl or people with positive attitudes toward kids who do not have children
• People might have many reasons for failing to act on their attitudes
• Once you are aware of all these reasons, the finding that attitudes so often fail to predict behaviour may no
longer seem so surprising
Attitudes Sometimes Conflict with Other Powerful Determinants of Behaviour
• Attitudes compete with other determinants of behaviour
• Attitudes do not always win out over these other determinants, and hence attitudes are not always so tightly
connected to behaviour
• One particularly potent determinant of a person’s actions that can weaken the relationship between attitudes and
behaviour is an individual’s understanding of the prevailing norms of appropriate behaviour
• The hotel and restaurant owners in LaPiere’s study may have wanted to turn away the Chinese couple but
refrained from doing so out of concern about how it would look and the scene it might cause
Attitudes Are Sometimes Inconsistent
• Attitudes may conflict with one another
• The different components of an attitude may not always align
• There can be a rift between the affective component (what we feel about Russell Crowe) and the cognitive
component (what we think about him)
• When the affective and cognitive components of an attitude are inconsistent, the attitude may not predict
behaviour very well
• The cognitive component might determine the attitude we express, but the affective component might
determine our behaviour (or vice versa)
• The restaurant and hotel owners from LaPiere’s study might have thought it was bad for their business to serve
Chinese individuals; but the feelings aroused by a living, breathing Chinese couple may have made it hard to deny
them service
Introspecting about the Reasons for Our Attitudes
• Sometimes it’s not so easy to know exactly why we like someone
• It may not be because of specific, readily identifiable attributes; we may simply share some indescribable
chemistry
• When we introspect about the reasons, however, we may focus on what is easy to identify, easy to justify, and
easy to capture in words—and thus miss the real reason for our attraction
• Thinking about why we like someone can sometimes lead to confusion about what our true feelings really are
• Timothy Wilson has shown that this effect applies far beyond our attitudes toward romantic partners;
introspecting about the reasons for our attitudes about all sorts of things can undermine how well those attitudes
guide our behaviour
• The cause in all cases is the same: introspection may lead us to focus on the easiest-to-identify reasons for liking
or disliking something at the expense of the real reasons for our likes and dislikes
• When people are induced to think carefully about the reasons they prefer one product over another (as opposed to
simply stating a preference), they are more likely to regret their choice later, and their choices are less likely to
correspond to the “true” value of the product as determined by experts
• This does not mean that introspection is always, or even typically, harmful and that we should forgo careful
analysis and always go with our gut
• The contaminating effect of introspection is limited to those times when the true source of our attitude is hard
to pin down—as when the basis of our attitude is largely affective
• When the basis of our attitude is largely cognitive, the search for reasons is more likely to yield the real
reasons, and introspection is unlikely to diminish the relationship between attitude and behaviour
• Thus, introspecting about your reasons for liking a certain artist may create a rift between your expressed attitude
and your subsequent behaviour, but introspecting about why you would prefer one digital camera over another is
unlikely to create such a rift
Attitudes Are Sometimes Based on Secondhand Information
• What is your attitude toward the British royal family? Chances are you’ve never met the British royalty
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Document Summary
Chinese individuals; but the feelings aroused by a living, breathing chinese couple may have made it hard to deny them service. Figure 7. 1: group initiation and liking for the group. Ratings of a discussion group by participants who experienced no initiation, a mild initiation, or a severe initiation to join the group. One way for the participants in the severe initiation condition to reduce dissonance was convincing themselves that the group was not so boring after all. In other words, don"t go overboard with the incentives. If the inducements are too substantial, people will justify their behaviour by the inducements, and they will not need to rationalize their behaviour by coming to believe in the broader purpose behind it. But if the inducements are just barely sufficient, people"s need to rationalize will tend to produce a deep-seated attitude change in line with their behaviour.
