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ATTITUDES AND PERSUASION

The greatest discovery of my generation is that a human being

can alter his life by altering his attitude. – William James

What are Attitudes?

• People are not neutral observers of the world.

• They evaluate what they encounter.

• They form attitudes.

• Attitudes can be formed about anything:

– Pizza

– Sushi

– Seattle Seahawks

– UW

– WSU

– President Obama

– President Trump

Why Study Attitudes?

Attitudes are important because

they:

• strongly influence our social

thought

– help to organize and evaluate

stimuli (e.g., categorizing stimuli as

positive or negative)

• presumably have a strong affect

on behavior

– help to predict people’s behavior in

wide range of contexts (e.g., voting,

interpersonal relations)

The ABC’s of Attitudes

1. Affective - your emotional reactions toward the object. “I am scared of snakes.”

2. Behavioral - your actions or observable behavior toward the object. “I will scream and run if I see a snake.”

3. Cognitive - your thoughts and beliefs about the object. “I think snakes are dangerous.”

Behavioral

Where do our

attitudes come from?

• Even if there is a genetic

component, our social

experiences clearly play a large

role in shaping our attitudes.

• Not all attitudes are created

equally.

• Though all attitudes have “ABC”

components, any attitude can be

based more on one type of

experience than another.

• Table Talk - Think about a decision you made which you logically reasoned out. SCHOOL APPROPRIATE!!!

Sometimes our attitudes are based primarily on the relevant facts, such as:

• The quality of an automobile.

• Which college should I go to?

• Should I say yes to this job offer?

Cognitively Based

Attitude -An attitude

based primarily on

people’s beliefs about the

factual properties of an

object.

• Table Talk: Think about something that you

like or dislike emotionally. SCHOOL

APPROPRIATE!!!

• If affectively based attitudes do not come

from examining the facts, where do they

come from?

• They can result from:

1. People’s values, such as religious and moral

beliefs

2. Sensory reactions, such as liking the taste

of pizza

3. Aesthetic reactions, such as admiring a

sunset

4. Conditioning

Affectively Based

Attitude An attitude

based on people’s

feelings and

values of anattitude

object.

Types of Conditioning

– Social learning by

association –

Classical Conditioning - The

phenomenon whereby two stimuli are

linked together to produce a new

learned response in a person or animal.

Operant Conditioning - The

phenomenon whereby an individual

makes an association between a

particular behavior and a consequence.

Application of

Conditioning –

Classical

• Home

• School

• Mobile phones

Operant

• Home

• School

• Athletics

• Self-improvement

Affectively Based

Attitudes Summary

Although affectively based attitudes come from many sources, we can group them into one family because they:

(1) Do not result from a rational examination of the issues

(2) Are not governed by logic (e.g., persuasive arguments about the issues seldom change an affectively based attitude)

(3) Are often linked to people’s values, so that trying to change them challenges a person’s values.

• Attitudes held by an individual may have

great influence on their behavior,

sometimes they may not.

• Why are some attitudes stronger than

others?

1.Directly affects own self interests.

2.Related to deeply held philosophical,

political, or religious views

3.Concern of close friends, family, social

interest groups.

Behaviorally Based

Attitude -An attitude

based on observations of

how one behaves toward

an object.

Strength of Attitudes

and Behavior

We often expect the behavior of a person to be

consistent with the attitudes that they hold.

When does attitude consistency occur?

1) When individuals are well informed

2) When there is direct personal experience

3) When the attitude is attacked from a

persuasive message

4) When the attitude can be quickly brought

to mind

So, how can attitudes be changed?

How can attitudes change?

•Self-persuasion

•Persuasion by

Communication

SELF-PERSUASION

Cognitive Dissonance

-Leon Festinger

(1957)

• the theory that we act to reduce the

discomfort (dissonance) we feel when two of

our thoughts (cognitions) are inconsistent.

For example, when we become aware that

our attitudes and our actions clash, we can

reduce the resulting dissonance by changing

our attitudes.

Cognitive Dissonance

Playing a role

• In a social situations, people engage

in behaviors they might not

normally in order to fit in to a group

or conform to expected behaviors

• When people take on specific roles,

sometimes just through acting, they

become absorbed in those roles

• Examples?

• Behavior, in this case, changes

attitude

Change to #9. This is the

new question. Grab a

computer or use your

mobile device to read the

article.

• Read the BBC story about

Jeremy Sivits at,

https://www.bbc.com/news/44

031774. How are his reflection

of the events at Abu Ghraib

similar or different to those

reflections from the

participants in the Stanford

Prison Experiment?

PERSUASION BY COMMUNICATION

ADOLF HITLER

Your Name is your buzzer:

Who said the following quote?

“The receptive ability of the masses is very limited, their

understanding small; on the other hand, the have a

great power of forgetting.”

Two Routes to

Persuasion

• Centrally, when people are motivated and have the ability to pay attention to the arguments in the communication.

• Peripherally, when people do not pay attention to the arguments, but are instead swayed by surface characteristics.

1. The Source (who)

2. The Nature (how)

3. The Audience (to whom)

Here people will not be swayed by the logic of the arguments because they are not paying close attention to what the communicator says. Instead, they are persuaded if the surface characteristics of the message—such as the fact that it is long or is delivered by an expert or attractive communicator—make it seem like a reasonable one. Petty and Cacioppo call this the peripheral route to persuasion because people are swayed by things peripheral to the message itself.

Motivation to Pay

Attention to the

Arguments

• The more personally relevant an issue is, the more willing people are to pay attention to the arguments in a speech, and therefore the more likely people are to take the central route to persuasion.

Table Talk: What

do you notice in the

graphs?

Common Peripheral

Routes

Speaker

• Credibility – How competent and trustworthy is

the source

• Likability – The more we like the source, the more

believable they are

Message

• Appeals to Fear – Scare tactics to change

attitudes/behavior

• Positive Appeals to Emotion – A positive mood

can affect the way people see the world

• Personal Experience – If someone we know has

gone through it, our nature is to believe that story

Common Peripheral

Routes

Speaker

• Credibility – How competent and trustworthy is

the source

• Likability – The more we like the source, the more

believable they are

Message

• Appeals to Fear – Scare tactics to change

attitudes/behavior

• Positive Appeals to Emotion – A positive mood

can affect the way people see the world

• Personal Experience – If someone we know has

gone through it, our nature is to believe that story

Quiz Prep Directions

• You will be given two (2) 3x5 cards (they are a random

assortment so color or lines means nothing)

• Label one card ‘A’ and the other ‘B’

• On each card:

– Create four (4) questions about anything we talked about in the

class Social Psychology related.

– Create one (1) random trivia question of your choosing.

• Each question must have a single answer.

• When we begin, you will ask your questions to a partner. Track

how many you answered correctly.

• After you are finished, your partner will ask you their

questions. Track how many you answered correctly.

• Once you are both finished, you will switch and find a brand

new partner.

Development of Theory

• Developed by Leon Festinger (1957)

• Cognitive dissonance theory suggests that we have an inner

drive to hold all our attitudes and behavior in harmony and

avoid disharmony (or dissonance).

• Arose out of a participant observation study of a cult which

believed that the earth was going to be destroyed by a flood,

and what happened to its members — particularly the really

committed ones who had given up their homes and jobs to

work for the cult — when the flood did not happen.

• While fringe members were more inclined to recognize that

they had made fools of themselves and to "put it down to

experience," committed members were more likely to re-

interpret the evidence to show that they were right all along

(the earth was not destroyed because of the faithfulness of

the cult members).

Explicitvs.

ImplicitAttitudes

(a.k.a. Biases)

Explicit – Attitudes that are on the surface we can easily identify

Implicit – Attitudes that are unconscious and

appear automatically without our thinking.