Psychology 3740F/G Chapter Notes - Chapter 8: Caffeine, Psych

• School: Western University
• Department: Psychology
• Course: Psychology 3740F/G
• Professor: Morrison

Document Summary

Chapter 8: basic principles in how attitudes are shaped. The first principle is that attitudes can be influenced by information that has at best, weak relevance to the attitude object: we are more likely to believe people who are attractive. Experiments have found that people remain favourable even after learning that the desirable consequence will not occur. Other somewhat unusual influences include the communicators rate of speech, accent, the use of humor, citations of consensus, colour cues and the communicators name. High motivation and ability make people more likely to use information that is more directly relevant to the attitude object, rather than less relevant cues. Kunda: found that caffeine consumption predicted women"s negative reactions to a message linking caffeine to fibrocystic disease but caffeine consumption did not predict message acceptance in men. The third principle is that attitude change partly depends on whether messages emphasize content, structure, or functions that are the basis or the recipients own attitude.