Upload
others
View
1
Download
0
Embed Size (px)
Citation preview
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.