Week 10

Psychology 2100: Introduction to Social Psychology

Warren Thorngate, Professor
Psychology Department, Carleton University
1125 Colonel By Drive
Ottawa, Ontario K1S 5B6
Canada
e-mail = warren_thorngate@carleton.ca

Attitudes and social influence

Why study attitudes?
A central concept in social psychology linking what and how we think and feel with what we do
A central concept in public discussion of psychological causes social and personal problems:

"Fred has a bad attitude"
"Ethel might do better in university if she changed her attitude about studying"

Attitude change attempts are ubiquitous aspects of social influence

In discussions and arguments with family, friends and strangers
In all aspects of advertising
In "education"
In socialization and acculturation, etc.

Formalized 3,000 years ago in the development of rhetoric: the art and craft of persuasion
Based on the belief that if we change someone's attitudes, then we are likely to change their behaviour (as we shall see, this assumption is often untrue)
Based on the desire to change other people to suit ourselves

What are attitudes?

Original definition: an "orientation" towards something; a posture
The word borrowed by social psychologists in 1920s as the best approximation for someone's mental orientation toward an activity, event, idea, etc.
The concept of an attitude soon refined and expanded to include three components:

Beliefs = the cognitive or "thinking" component (above the neck), reflecting the strength of association between ideas. Beliefs indicate what we conceive as true or false
Values = the emotional or "feeling" component (below the neck). Values reflect our liking or disliking, our judgements of good or bad
Actions = the behavioural or "doing" component. Actions reflect what is important or unimportant

Most attitude theory today is based on the idea that beliefs and values combine to form attitudes, and that attitudes lead to preferences for actions. Actions, however, are the result of both preferences and constraints. Thus, attitudes may lead us to prefer some action, but we may not act because of our constraints (which in turn may be based on other attitudes). Example:

"I believe that global warming must be stopped immediately."
global warming has many consequences
almost all of these consequences are bad
avoiding these bad consequences is good
doing something to avoid these bad consequences is good
but if I do something, I must sacrifice my dreams and lifestyle
it is bad to sacrifice my dreams and lifestyle
so I will dislike global warming, but do nothing about it

Beliefs and values grow in an extremely complex network. Social psychologists call different parts of the network a

Belief System = associations among ideas, and a
Value System = associations among feelings and preferences

Consider your associations with the word Beer

The concepts/ideas shown by the words in the boxes + the black lines linking them are called our belief system. Further associations among feelings (red lines) are called our value system. As shown with lines of varying thickness, our associations can vary in their strength. Thus, we may have a stronger association between beer and drink or beer and party, than between beer and thirsty or beer and hockey.

Our attitude toward beer is the set of all connections like those shown above.
If the sum of our feelings, good and bad, toward beer is more positive than negative, we may wish to act accordingly. Example: we may wish to buy beer. But this action may be impossible due to many constraints: no money, no time, etc.

In belief and value systems, some ideas, concepts, values have many connections and some have only a few. The beliefs and values with many connections we call central; they define central attitudes. The beliefs and values with few connections we call peripheral; they define peripheral attitudes

Examples of central (and important) attitudes:

self, family, god
democracy, education, progress
high paying, personally rewarding and secure career

Examples of peripheral (and unimportant) attitudes:

toilet paper, filtered milk, paperclips, ice beer
Yemen, Chad, Paraguay
Road repair in Moose Jaw

General rule: Central attitudes are learned early in life

General rule: It is much easier to change peripheral attitudes than to change central attitudes

How are attitudes measured?

Direct methods (in your face, reactive)

Surveys and questionnaires
Interviews
Scaling techniques: Likert scales and all that

Indirect methods

Archival records: books, letters, diaries, speeches and pottery
Traces: pathways, carpets, nose grease
Other: Lost letters (Milgram and Knox), lost and found columns (Thorngate & Love)

Advantages and disadvantages of each method

Four ways of acquiring and changing attitudes

Direct experience
Indirect experience
Functional experience
Thought and imagination

Direct experience

Classical conditioning

UCS, UCR, CS -> CR
Generalization and discrimination

Operant conditioning

Partial reinforcement and persistence
Secondary reinforcement and chaining
Social reinforcement
The role of causal attribution

Indirect experience: attitude formation via observational learning

Learning from the mistakes (and triumphs) of others: modelling and imitation
Learning from stories: lectures, books, gossip and rumour
The new media: radio, television, Internet, etc.
Distortions: The more indirect the experience, the more it differs from direct experience

Levelling, sharpening and selectivity

Functional experience: attitudes to be accepted

Attitudes as expressions of personality dynamics: symbolism
Attitudes as expressions of group norms and conformity
Functional experience and religious conversion: Jim Jones, Moonies, et al

Thought and imagination: recombining beliefs

Logic versus Psycho-logic

"Most terrorists are Moslem; therefore we should not trust Moslems" (logically ridiculous but, alas, often psycho-logically compelling)

Appeals to authority

"Men should grow beards because many professors have beards and they are smart"
"Two out of three doctors prefer Colgate" [to what: bird droppings? And how many doctors were surveyed: 3?]

Appeals to experience (anecdotal evidence)

Mary had her purse stolen in Chicago, so I don't think it is safe go there."
"I know someone who ate soy butter and hated it. So I don't want to buy it."

Appeals to motives and emotions

"If you think about the future, you will feel upset. So think about the present instead."
"Dream the impossible.You can be anything you want to be!" [patent nonsense!]

Imagination and attitudes

The pleasures of idealism: attitudes from visions of perfection
The joys of paranoia: the vitiation of refutation
Imaginary playmates and the JR Ewing effect