The Psychology of Attitudes and Attitude Change

Joseph P. Forgas, Joel Cooper, William D. Crano, Joseph P. Forgas, Joel Cooper, William D. Crano

• Publisher: Psychology Press
• Year: 2011
• eBook ISBN: 9781136897788
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Human beings have a unique ability to create elaborate predispositions and evaluations based on their social experiences. The concept of attitudes is central to understanding how experience gives rise to these predispositions, and psychologists have spent the best part of the past 100 years trying to understand the intricacies of this process. Yet, despite decades of research, we still do not fully understand how attitudes are created, maintained and changed.

The main objective of this book is to review and integrate some of the most recent, cutting-edge developments in research on attitudes and attitude change, presenting the work of eminent scholars in this field. Chapters in this book deal with such intriguing questions as: What role do associative processes play in the formation of attitudes? How do attitudes function as global and local action guides? What is the function of implicit evaluations, and vicarious experiences in producing attitude change? Are implicit associations a useful way to measure attitudes? What role does affect play in attitude formation and change? What role do social interaction processes play in persuasion, and how does persuasion work in real-life settings?

The book is essential reading for students and researchers in social psychology, as well as practitioners in every field where understanding and changing attitudes is important, such as clinical, counseling, organizational, marketing, forensic, and developmental psychology.

Section I
Introduction and Basic Issues

1
Attitudes and Attitude Change
An Introductory Review

WILLIAM D. CRANO, JOEL COOPER, AND JOSEPH P. FORGAS

One of the most striking characteristics of human beings is our ability to effortlessly and automatically construct elaborate plans and form predispositions and behavioral intentions based on our past experiences, media exposure, and other forms of socially supplied information. The concept of attitudes is central to understanding how experience gives rise to predispositions, and psychologists have spent the best part of the past hundred years trying to understand the intricacies of this process. The main objective of this book is to review and integrate some of the most recent developments in research on attitudes and attitude change, presenting the work of eminent scholars in this field.

Despite decades of research, the question of how attitudes are created, maintained, and changed, and how they eventually come to influence behavior, remain as intriguing as ever. What role do associative processes play in the formation of attitudes? How do attitudes function as global and local action guides? What is the function of implicit evaluations and vicarious experiences in producing attitude change? Are implicit associations really a useful way to measure attitudes? What are the respective roles played by affect, needs, and social interactions in attitude formation and change, and how effectively can persuasion be used in pragmatic and real-life contexts to change attitudes? What contribution can attitude research make to understanding prejudice, intergroup attitudes, and political attitudes? These are just some of the issues we intend to explore in this volume.

To answer questions such as these, we have divided this volume into four basic sections. The first section of the book, after this introductory chapter, addresses some of the general issues about the nature and characteristics of attitudes and the processes underlying their formation (chapters by Johnson & Boynton; Ledgerwood & Trope; Walther & Langer; Fiedler). In the second section, a number of contributors consider the cognitive and affective processes involved in attitude formation and change (Spencer, Peach, Yoshida, & Zanna; Holbrook & Krosnick; Cooper; Forgas). The third section of the book presents research that explores the processes, mechanisms, and applications of attitude change and persuasion (Harmon-Jones, Amodio, & Harmon-Jones; Wänke & Reutner; Williams, Chen, & Wegener; Prislin). Finally, in the fourth, concluding section of the book we focus on the application, implications, and extensions of attitude research to various applied and real-life domains (chapters by Crano; Major & Townsend; Rhodewalt & Peterson; Blascovich & McCall). We will begin, however, with a brief theoretical and historical review of attitude research in social psychology.

FROM EXPERIENCE TO PREDISPOSITION

It has long been recognized in social science theorizing that humans possess a unique symbolic capacity to distill their social experiences into stable mental representations that come to guide their future plans and behaviors. Several influential theories sought to deal with this proposition. The theories of Max Weber (1947), although rarely invoked in experimental social psychology, assume a direct relationship between an individual’s beliefs and evaluations—their “attitudes”—and their subsequent social behavior in how larger social systems and structures are created and maintained. Weber’s classic analysis linking the advent of capitalism with the spread of the protestant ethic is fundamentally a social psychological theory.

Weber suggests that the historical change to the attitudes and values of protestantism was the fundamental force that shaped large-scale social and economic processes, such as the advent of capitalist social organization (Weber, 1947). For Weber, mental representations—attitudes—are the key to understanding interpersonal and societal processes, still one of the key objectives of contemporary attitude research (see Crano, this volume; Major & Townsend, this volume). His work on bureaucracies is especially interesting, as he argued that understanding the attitudes and mind-set of the bureaucrat is the key to explaining how bureaucracies function. On the one hand, the rule systems that define bureaucracies play a critical role in shaping and maintaining the attitudes of the bureaucrat; in turn, such attitudes help to explain their behaviors toward their clients and coworkers.

Weber’s methodologies also involved an innovative attempt to combine qualitative and quantitative data with the analysis of historical and cultural processes. Several of the chapters here report important progress in research on the interface of individual attitudes and social systems and behavior that has a distinctly Weberian flavor (e.g., Crano; Prislin; Ledgerwood & Trope; Wänke & Reutner). Indeed, one could make a plausible case that Max Weber was one of the precursors of modern social attitude research, and it is regrettable that his work and approach remain largely unrecognized by most social psychologists today.

Another important theoretical framework that is highly relevant to the concerns of the present book is symbolic interactionism, and the work of George Herbert Mead. Mead’s “social behaviorism” was a comprehensive attempt to create a theory that links individual symbolic mental processes to the regulation of real-life social behaviors. Mead emphasized that interpersonal behavior is both the source and the product of the symbolic representations and expectations—in essence, attitudes—of social actors.

By symbolically distilling and representing social experiences, the individual acquires social expertise and attitudes, which lie at the core of the socialized “me.” Attitudes and symbolic representations in turn regulate subsequent behaviors— although attitudes are not acted out in a simple determinate fashion in everyday life. It is the role of the unique, creative “I” to continuously reassess, monitor, and redefine attitudes as they are applied, injecting a sense of indeterminacy and openness into our social behaviors. Understanding the nature of this indeterminacy in the attitude-behavior relationship has remained one of the core concerns of attitude research to this day (see chapters by Johnson & Boynton; Spencer et al.; Prislin; Williams et al.; Crano).

Symbolic interactionism has not become a dominant theory within social psychology, most probably because the methodologies available at the time did not provide a suitable empirical means for studying individual mental representations. Yet contemporary attitude and social cognitive research often deals with the same kinds of questions that were of interest to Weber and Mead: How are individual thoughts, beliefs, representations, and attitudes derived from social experiences, and do they in turn influence interpersonal behavior (see also chapters by Cooper; Forgas; Wänke & Reutner; Major & Townsend; Rhodewalt & Peterson; Holbrook & Krosnick, this volume). The work of Weber and Mead thus provides a fascinating and largely untapped reservoir of intriguing theories and hypotheses about the ways that symbolic representations of past experiences give rise to attitudes and eventually influence real social behaviors.

ATTITUDES IN EMPIRICAL PSYCHOLOGY: HISTORY AND BACKGROUND

The study of attitudes, their measurement, formation, stability, change, and their causes and effects, has been a central preoccupation of social psychology from the field’s earliest days. Although the science of social psychology is only a little more than a century old, Thomas and Znaniecki wrote in 1928 that social psychology was essentially the study of the attitude. The understanding of what constituted an attitude was broader then than it is today, and for Thomas and Znaniecki, the term attitude denoted a collective, cultural construct, rather than the now dominant conceptualization of attitude as an individualistic, intrapsychic characteristic.

The scientific study of attitudes was made possible by the development of methods to assess them. L. L. Thurstone (1928) and R. Likert (1932) developed sophisticated methods to develop scales that could be used to study attitudes. With the publication of attitude measurement techniques, the volume of empirical research in attitudes exploded. Gordon Allport (1935) declared the attitude to be “the most distinctive and indispensable concept in contemporary American social psychology” (p. 198). From the perspective of the 21st century, it is clear that Allport’s assessment remains true, with the caveat that the qualifying term American is no longer required. A literature search using attitude as the search term yields approximately 50,000 articles, chapters, books, and dissertations (Visser & Cooper, 2007).

Indeed it is difficult to find much in the voluminous literature of social psychology that does not refer in some ways directly or indirectly to attitudes as a central construct. Only a few years after innovative attitude measurement techniques were introduced by Thurstone and Likert, attitude scaling and measurement became a defining preoccupation of social psychologists. We have developed additional distinctive and indispensible concepts and techniques since Allport’s days, but it is fair to say that attitudes have always maintained their place at the head of social psychology’s table.

This is not to suggest that it has been all smooth sailing. Social psychology’s attitudes toward attitudes have waxed and waned. At times, other constructs have generated more excitement, but the place of attitudes in social psychology has never been supplanted. Perhaps the best historical perspective of the role of attitudes in social psychology was put, as might be expected, by Bill McGuire (1985), who observed, “The field has been a mosaic of heterogeneous pieces from the start, but attitudes have always been one of the central elements of the design” (p. 234). This measured appraisal reflects social psychology’s romance with the attitude construct more fairly than Allport’s more sanguine view. The relationship has not always been steady. There have been rifts and occasional dalliances but never a divorce.

Why this focus on a construct that has characterized an entire field of behavioral research for the past 80 years persists is explained in this volume. The intellectual scope of the work is vast, ranging from the apparently simple associative learning models of the evaluative conditioners (see Wänke & Reutner, this volume) to the more complex considerations of the implicit attitudes theorists (see Fiedler, this volume) to applied researchers’ concern over the factors that impel a consumer to choose one product over another, or to initiate or resist using an illicit drug. The theories and methods underlying these varied operations are well developed, and still developing (see Spencer et al.; Williams et al.; Holbrook & Krosnick, this volume). The breadth of our studies speaks to the diversity and richness of the field, and to the potential for researchers in this area to contribute meaningfully to social progress and to solving practical problems. The work outlined in this volume is timely, exciting, and useful. However, before we begin to consider this rich fare, some background is necessary to fully appreciate this splendid table of intellectual treats set here for our readers.

THE PEAKS AND TROUGHS IN ATTITUDE RESEARCH

Research activity on attitudes has ebbed and flowed over the years. McGuire (1985) identified three peaks in interest in the intellectual progression of research on attitudes, to which Prislin and Crano (2008) added a fourth. The first peak (1920s–1930s) was concerned with the fundamental nature and consequent measurement of the construct. Here we find the giants of attitude measurement— Thurstone, Guttman, Likert, Osgood—whose ideas regarding the proper way to measure (i.e., operationalize) attitudes of necessity shaped the very ways we conceptualize the construct. Their work is honored in today’s measurement approaches, none of which stray far from the bases laid down so many years ago, and in the emphasis on the evaluative nature of attitudes, a defining feature of most attitude measures from Thurstone onward.

An interregnum in the 1940s followed the first peak, when social psychology and the world at large focused on bigger game than attitudes. It is fair to say, however, that World War II also was a watershed time for the development of attitude theory, for during this period, Carl Hovland worked in the Information and Education Division of the U.S. War Department, where he designed and evaluated the training programs and films prepared for American troops. During this period, he assembled some of the most talented attitude researchers in North America to help in the war effort.

In the second peak (1950s and 1960s), Hovland brought many of his wartime colleagues to Yale, where he founded the Yale Communication and Attitude Change Program, which arguably set the stage for investigation of many of the phenomena with which attitude researchers today concern themselves. The basic laboratory experimental approach, coupled with issues of real-world relevance, characterized the Yale group’s general investigative orientation. The field has preserved much of the experimental orientation of the Yale group, but over the years often failed to connect its work with issues of social importance, a guiding principle of Hovland and his colleagues.

During this same peak period, important developments in attitude research and theory also were being made on the country’s other coast, at Stanford University. There, blessed with a stable of some of the country’s most talented students, Leon Festinger was researching an audacious theory that was to turn the standard attitude → behavior chain on its head. Of his three seminal contributions—the theories of social communication, social comparison, and cognitive dissonance— dissonance has had the most widespread effect, though social comparison, with its periodic renewals of popularity, has obvious staying power as well (Festinger, 1950, 1954, 1957; Stapel & Suls, 2007).

Dissonance has been a central feature of much research in social psychology (see Cooper; Harmon-Jones et al., this volume). The theory has been cited more than 2,000 times, and the count rises with every passing day as dissonance researchers continue ...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS
• SECTION I: INTRODUCTION AND BASIC ISSUES
• SECTION II: ATTITUDES: COGNITIVE AND AFFECTIVE PROCESSES
• SECTION III: ATTITUDES AND PERSUASION
• SECTION IV: APPLICATIONS AND IMPLICATIONS OF ATTITUDE RESEARCH