Attitude and Behavior

s The ancestor of every action

s is thought
What is an
Attitude?
• A favorable or unfavorable evaluative reaction towards
something or someone (often rooted in one’s beliefs, and
exhibited in one’s feelings and intended behavior). The learned
predisposition to respond cognitively, affectively, and
behaviorally to a particular object, person, place, thing, or event
in an evaluative way
The ABCs of attitudes:
Affect (feelings)
Behavior (actions)
Cognitions (thoughts and beliefs)

Example of attitude: if you are an environmentalist, that would

probably be an attitude because you would generally feel
emotions about the importance of protecting the environment,
and as a result you might do things like recycle, drive a fuel
efficient car, ride a bike
Attitude
formation

• We learn attitudes through

direct instruction, personal
experiences, and
observation.
Example: Showing women
100 pictures of plus-size
models caused them to
change their initial attitude,
which had been to prefer
the thin ideal.
How Well Do Our Attitudes Predict Our
Behavior?
People’s expressed attitudes hardly predicted their varying
behaviors
❑Student attitudes toward cheating bore little relation to the
likelihood of their
❑Self-described actually
racial cheating.
attitudes provided little clue to behaviors in
actual situations.
❑What they think is not actually how they will behave.
The disjuncture between attitudes and actions is known as moral
hypocrisy
How well our attitude predict our
do s Implicit Association Test A
(IAT)
computer-driven assessment of implicit
behavior?
• When Attitudes Predict behavior attitudes. The test uses reaction times to
measure people’s automatic associations
• When social influence on what we say are minimal between attitude objects and evaluative
words. Easier pairings (and faster
• Implicit responses) are taken to indicate stronger
unconscious associations.
• Implicit association test (IAT)
• Implicit biases are persistent
• People differ in implicit bias
• People are often unaware of their implicit biases
• Explicit
• When other influences on behavior are minimal
Impact bias
• the impact bias, a form of which is the durability bias, is the tendency
for people to overestimate the length or the intensity of future
emotional states
Theories of Attitude Formation
• Classical Conditioning: Learning based on Association
• Direct route vs indirect route
• Subliminal conditioning (classical conditioning that
occurs in the absence of the conscious awareness
of the stimuli involved)
• Illusion of truth effect (mere repetition creates a
sense of familiarity and results in more positive
attitude)
• Instrumental Conditioning: Rewards for the Right Views
• Rewards received because of voicing certain attitudes by
people we identify with or wants to be accepted by tends
to be strengthened and are likely to be repeated
• E.g. children’s political, social and religious views similar to
their parent’s
• Tend to change when we enter new social networks
• Expressing different attitudes to different audiences
• Observational Learning: Learning by Exposure to Others
• In the absence of rewards of punishments, we can still
form attitudes by simply observing others
• Social comparison- our tendency to compare ourselves
with others in order to determine whether our view of
social reality is correct or not (if others hold the same
attitude, our attitude might be right)
• Holding attitude closer to the reference group (people we
are close to and identify our values with)
When and Why Do Attitudes
Influence Behaviour
• Why attitudes do not straightforwardly predict behaviour?
• Role of Social Context in the Link between Attitude and
Behaviour
• Social context e.g. would you express a negative attitude
to a close friend who just got a tattoo
• In certain social contexts we practice a conscious choice
not to act on our ‘true’ attitude depending on the degree
to which actions have social consequences or not
• This might not actually predict your own personal
behaviour of getting a tattoo done for yourself
• Other features of the attitude are also important
• E.g. how certain or uncertain you are about your own
attitude
• If you are induced to think that your attitude is stable across
time, you feel more certain about these attitudes and are
more likely to act on them
• Older people are more certain about their attitude then
younger people
• Pluralistic ignorance (when we erroneously believe that
others have attitude different than ourselves)
• Strength of Attitudes
• Attitudes based on moral conviction can give rise to intense emptions
and can predict behaviour
• Extremity of an attitude *how strong the emotional reaction is)
may be influenced by our vested interests
• The degree of certainty with which the attitude is held (the sense
that you know what your attitude is (clarity) and the feeling that it is
the correct position to hold (correctness/ certainty which comes
from repetition))
• Extent to which the attitude is based on the personal experience
• These three factors can affect attitude accessibility ( how easily the
attitude comes to mind in various situations) which ultimately
determines the extent to which attitudes drive our behaviour
How Do Attitude Guide
Behaviour
• More than one basic mechanism through which
attitude can shape behaviour
• Through reasoned thought and spontaneous
behavioural responses
• Attitudes Arrived at Reasoned Thought
• Careful, deliberate thought
• Explained by theory of planned behaviour
• Decision to engage in a particular behaviour is a result of
rational process, various behavioural options are
considered, the consequences or outcomes of each are
evaluated, and a decision id reached to act or not to act
• Gives rise to behavioural intension, which are good
predictors (moderately correlated) of whether we will act
on our attitudes in a given situation
• E.g. engaging in regular exercise
• Usually implementation plan strengthens the intension-
behaviour link as it helps delegating control of one’s
behaviour to the situation
• Theory also explains how do you form an intension
to change some aspect of your behaviour
• Intensions are determined by three factors:
• Attitudes towards the behaviour: whether it will
yield negative or positive consequences
• Subjective norms: perception if others will
approve or disprove this behaviour
• Perceived behavioural control: people’s
appraisal of their ability to perform the
behaviour
• Attitudes and Spontaneous Behavioural Reactions
• In situations where people have to act quickly, in
such situations attitudes influence behavioural in a
more direct and automatic manner
• Explained through attitude-to behaviour process
model
• Some events activates an attitude, Once activated
it influences how we perceive the attitude object
• Simultaneously our knowledge of social norms
(what appropriate) is also activated
• Our attitude together with our stored information
of what's appropriate shape our definition of the
event
The Fine Art of Persuasion: How
Attitudes are Changed
• Efforts to change out attitudes through the use of various
kinds of messages
• Who says what to whom with what effect
• Communicators who are credible (have expertise,
ingroup, low self-interest)
• Communicators who are physically attractive or likable
• Messages that do not appear to be designed to change
our attitudes are often far more successful than those
that seems to be designed to achieve this goal
• Effect of fear appeals: when message sufficiently fear
arousing that people generally feel threatened, they are
likely to argue against the threat, or dismiss its applicability
to themselves. Mild fear provoking messages can have
greatest change if paired with the method about how to
change
• Positive vs negative framing of message
• Cognitive Processes underlying Persuasion: how do we process (absorb,
interpret and evaluate) a given message
• Two distinct ways suggested by Elaborate likelihood model
• Systematic Vs Heuristic Processing
• Systematic processing or central route to processing involves careful
consideration of the message content and the ideas it contains
• Requires effort, Absorbs much of our information-processing
capacity
• We engage in it when
• Our motivation and capacity to process information relating to
the persuasive message is high
• If we have lot of knowledge about the topic
• Lot of time to engage in careful thought
• The issue is sufficiently important to us and we believe it is
 • Heuristic processing or the peripheral route to persuasion
• Mental shortcuts such as that expert statements can be
trusted or the idea that if it makes me feel good, I am in favour
of it
• Less effort, more automatic
• Cue evoke mental shortcuts
• We engage in it when
• We lack the ability or capacity to process more carefully (we
must make up our minds very quickly or we have little
knowledge about the issue)
• Motivation to perform such cognitive work is low ( the issue
is unimportant to us or has little potential effect on us)
• Strength of argument is therefore more important when the
message has high relevance for the individual
Resisting Persuasion Attempts
• Reactance: Protecting our personal freedom-a negative
reaction to efforts by others to reduce our freedom by
getting us to believe or do what they want
• Forewarning: Prior knowledge of persuasive intent-provide
time to generate counterarguments for refuting the message
• Selective Avoidance of Persuasive Attempts: a tendency to
shift attention away from information that challenges our
existing attitude
• Actively Defending our Attitude: counter arguing against the
competition
• Individual Differences in Resistance to Persuasion
• Ego-depletion can undermine resistance to
persuasion
• Factors that make counter arguing can fail or become
difficult if people are unable to self-regulate (i.e. to
engage their will power in their own thinking)
• Vulnerability to persuasion increases when people are
tired, have failed to regulate on a prior task or are
otherwise in a state on ego-depletion
• Ego depletion vs strength of argument
• Resource depletion and cheating
Cognitive Dissonance: What it is
and How do we Manage it

• Sizeable gap between what we feel in the inside and what

we show on the outside
• We feel uncomfortable when we are aware that our
behaviour is not consistent with our attitude
• Cognitive dissonance: an unpleasant state that occurs
when we notice that our attitudes and behaviour are
inconsistent
• Cognitive dissonance can sometimes lead us to
change our own attitudes- to shift them so that they
are consistent with our overt behaviour, even in the
absence of any strong external pressure to do so
 Dissonance and Attitude
Change: The effect of Induced
•Compliance
Little Justification (few reasons, limited justification, cannot
explain away our behaviour to ourselves) intense
dissonance
• Festinger and Carlsmith (1959) experiment (less leads to
more effect) Attitude
Dissonance change is
is weak small

Attitude
Dissonance
change is
is large
large
Alternate Strategies for
Resolving Dissonance
• Direct methods
• Change behaviour and make it more consistent with our
attitude (buy more environmental friendly products after
non-environmentally friendly purchase to sustain our green
environment attitude)
• Resolve dissonance by adding new information
• Not giving importance to the inconsistency (trivialization)
concluding that either the attitude or the behaviour is not
important so any inconsistency between them is of no
importance
• Indirect Methods
• Dissonance remains but the unpleasant feeling can be
reduced by consuming alcohol, donating to charity
• Engage in self-affirmations
 When Dissonance is a Tool for
Beneficial Changes in Behaviour
• When people are made to come face to face with their
explicit attitude and overt behaviour discrepancy and to
realize their moral hypocrisy salient can be a powerful tool
for changing behaviour in a desirable way
• For this to be effective
• People must publically advocate the desired behaviour
• They need to be induced to think about their own
behavioural failures in the past
• Access to direct means for reducing their dissonance