Why We Evaluate

Functions of Attitudes

Gregory R. Maio, James M. Olson

• Publisher: Psychology Press
• Year: 1999
• Topic: Psychology
• eBook ISBN:
  9781135682446
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

As the first book to examine the psychological motivations underlying people's attitudes, as well as why people form attitudes, this volume presents empirical research describing theoretical perspectives and practical applications. The editors assembled the leaders in the field to examine the topics of attitude function persuasion, individual-differences approaches, and the role of motivation within a variety of psychological disciplines, including social, personality, consumer, and environmental.

1
Accessible Attitudes as Tools for Object Appraisal: Their Costs and Benefits

Russell H.Fazio
Indiana University

During the course of their daily lives, individuals encounter a multitude of objects. In fact, they are bombarded by a diverse array of stimuli and forced to make innumerable decisions about which to approach and which to avoid. These stimuli include not only such physical objects as foods, clothing, and toys but also other people, events, and activities. Moreover, societal matters, as well as conversations with others, often require that individuals adopt a position regarding various social and political issues. Thus, merely proceeding through a day involves individuals making a continuous series of choices based on their appraisals of objects.

When considered in this way, daily existence appears to be astoundingly burdensome. One can readily imagine an individual who is paralyzed by the need to assess and then weigh the pros and cons of the choice alternatives for each successive decision. Yet, few people—at least not those who can be considered mentally healthy—experience day-to-day life as so phenomenologically troublesome. How do we manage?

We are extremely adaptive creatures who have the capacity to learn from experience. We have memory for these experiences. We develop and remember vast storehouses of knowledge regarding the attributes that characterize the objects, people, issues, and events that we either encounter directly or learn about indirectly from others. As helpful as this knowledge base might be, however, it represents only an initial step toward individuals’ successful coping with the multitude of stimuli that impinge on them. Having knowledge regarding a given object available in memory provides a basis for choice, but still requires that individuals engage in extensive and effortful deliberation. They must retrieve the relevant stored information, consider its implications for approach or avoidance, and integrate those implications into a final judgment.

Although individuals unquestionably engage in such deliberation at times (see Fazio, 1990a; Sanbonmatsu & Fazio, 1990), even these processes do not seem to capture the ease with which individuals typically function in their daily lives. People do not simply acquire knowledge about the objects in their social world. Instead, individuals employ this knowledge—be it information about the positively and negatively valued attributes of the object, about their past behavioral experiences with the object, and/or about emotions that the object has evoked in the past—as the basis for forming for an attitude toward, or summary evaluation of, the object. In other words, individuals categorize objects along an evaluative dimension (see Fazio, Chen, McDonel, & Sherman, 1982; Zanna & Rempel, 1988, for further discussion of this definition of attitude). It is such categorizations into likes and dislikes—objects that we wish to approach and those that we wish to avoid—that enable individuals to progress easily through daily life. By imposing an evaluative structure on their social world, individuals can more easily cope with the demands of the social environment. Their attitudes provide an indication of which objects to approach and which to avoid, all in the interest of maximizing positive outcomes and minimizing negative outcomes.

THE OBJECT APPRAISAL FUNCTION

This argument regarding the functional utility of attitudes as readily available indicators of whether approach or avoidance is to be preferred has long been recognized in social psychology. In his classic discussion of attitudes, Allport (1935) stated:

Without guiding attitudes the individual is confused and baffled…. Attitudes determine for each individual what he will see and hear, what he will think and what he will do. To borrow a phrase from William James, they “engender meaning upon the world”; they draw lines about and segregate an otherwise chaotic environment; they are our methods for finding our way about in an ambiguous universe. (p. 806)

Similarly, both Katz (1960) and Smith, Bruner, and White (1956) commented on this knowledge or object appraisal function when they delineated an entire set of functions that can be served by attitudes. For example, Smith et al. (1956) argued as follows:

The holding of an attitude provides a ready aid in ‘sizing up’ objects and events in the environment from the point of view of one’s major interests and going concerns…. [It] permits the individual to check more quickly and efficiently the action-relevancy of the event in the environment around him. Presented with an object or event, [the individual] may categorize it in some class of objects and events for which a predisposition to action and experience exists. Once thus categorized, it becomes the focus of an already-established repertory of reactions and feelings, and the person is saved the energy-consuming and sometimes painful process of figuring out de novo how he shall relate himself to it…. In sum, then, attitudes aid us in classifying for action the objects of the environment, and they make appropriate response tendencies available for coping with these objects. (p.41)

The object appraisal function was only one of many noted by these attitude theorists. They also discussed, for example, how attitudes can provide a means of communicating one’s social identity, expressing one’s core values, and maintaining or enhancing one’s self-esteem. Attitudes toward a given object may assume a particular valence because that valence allows one to communicate valued group memberships, is congruent with one’s values, and/or bolsters one’s self-esteem. Unquestionably, attitude formation and expression can be affected by such factors. However, I believe that the inclusion of the object appraisal function as one entry in a list of such benefits potentially provided by attitudes both obscures a critical distinction and undervalues its importance. The other functions that theorists have discussed concern the basis for an attitude (i.e., the reasons that the attitude assumed a particular direction or valence). In contrast, the object appraisal function is unique in that it concerns the general utility of simply holding an attitude, regardless of its valence. That is, regardless of why the individual’s attitude took on a particular valence, the mere possession of any attitude is useful to the individual in terms of orienting him or her to the object in question. In this sense, the object appraisal function can be considered the primary value of possessing an attitude. Every attitude, regardless of any other functional benefits that it also might provide, serves this object appraisal function.

THE ATTITUDE-NONATTITUDE CONTINUUM

However, I also argue that not all attitudes are equally successful in serving an object appraisal function, for attitudes vary in the extent to which they are capable of providing the “ready aid” that Smith et al. (1956) mentioned. The theoretical model that underlies the research my colleagues and I have conducted on the functionality of attitudes views attitudes as associations in memory between the attitude object and a given summary evaluation of the object (see Fazio, 1995; Fazio et al., 1982, for a general review). The strength of such object-evaluation associations is presumed to vary across people and attitude objects. This associative strength is viewed as the major determinant of the attitude’s accessibility from memory (i.e., the likelihood that the evaluation will be activated from memory automatically on the individual’s encountering the attitude object). My colleagues and I argued that attitudes involving stronger object-evaluation associations more adequately fulfill the object appraisal function (e.g., Fazio, Blascovich, & Driscoll, 1992).

Although some researchers have argued that individuals automatically evaluate all attitude objects when they encounter them (Bargh, Chaiken, Raymond, & Hymes, 1996; Pratto, 1994), I believe that any such tendencies involve, at most, a very rudimentary surveillance of signals regarding safety versus threat. The extent to which individuals form what can be considered attitudes varies across situations. Attitude formation is not inevitable, but instead depends upon the presence of situational cues implying that it may be beneficial to have a summary evaluation of the attitude object stored in memory.

Evidence supporting this hypothesis is provided by research conducted by Fazio, Lenn, and Effrein (1984). This research took advantage of the often-observed finding that individuals who “compute” a judgment for the first time require substantially more time to do so than is required to express the judgment a second time. A number of experiments have found that individuals who have been forced to develop and express a judgment are capable of responding more quickly to a similar inquiry than are individuals who did not form judgments earlier (e.g., Carlston & Skowronski, 1986; Fazio et al., 1982; see Fazio, 1990b, for a general discussion of this issue). In each of two experiments, Fazio et al. (1984) exposed participants to a set of novel intellectual puzzles. Some participants, the consolidation condition, were forced to develop attitudes toward the puzzles; they were required to complete a questionnaire on which they rated the puzzles. No such questionnaire was administered in the no consolidation condition. When the participants were later asked to respond to a series of inquiries regarding their attitudes toward the puzzles, the expected effect was observed. Participants in the consolidation condition had faster response latencies.

However, what is of primary interest in this research are the response latencies in a third condition—among participants who, although not forced to consolidate by the need to complete a questionnaire, received a cue implying that it may be functional to develop attitudes toward the puzzles. In one experiment, the cue led participants to expect future questioning regarding the puzzles; the researcher, who was employing the puzzles as items for an aptitude test, was to interview the participants in the second half of the experiment. In a second experiment, the cue involved an expectation of future interaction; these participants were led to believe that they would have the opportunity to work more with any of the puzzle types that they wished in the second part of the experiment. In both experiments, the participants who received a cue responded just as quickly to the attitudinal inquiries as did the consolidation participants (who had been forced to develop and express attitudes) and more rapidly than the no consolidation participants (who received neither a cue nor a questionnaire forcing them to develop attitudes). Thus, the findings suggest that situational cues implying the functional value of possessing an attitude can prompt individuals to engage in relevant cognitive work, comparable to that pursued by individuals directly asked to provide an attitudinal judgment. Apparently, individuals do not spontaneously engage in the level of attitude development that is required to express an attitude unless they are motivated to do so by a cue suggesting that it may prove functionally beneficial to consider one’s attitude toward the novel objects.

Just as situations can vary in the extent to which they entail cues that will prompt attitude formation, individuals appear to vary in their chronic tendencies to engage in evaluative responding. Recent research by Jarvis and Petty (1996) has identified such an individual difference. Individuals with a higher “need to evaluate” were more likely to report having attitudes (i.e., less likely to select a “no opinion” option) toward a variety of social and political issues. They also were more likely to provide evaluative thoughts in a free-response listing about unfamiliar paintings or about a typical day in their lives.

Regardless of any pervasive predispositions that influence the likelihood that individuals will form attitudes, people’s general interests and knowledge also are bound to affect the extent to which they form attitudes toward novel objects. For example, some people are very unaware of national politics, whereas others follow the political scene closely. The latter are much more likely to develop an evaluative association regarding a newly emerging figure on the national political scene. Likewise, some people are avid basketball fans with highly rehearsed attitudes toward teams, players, and coaches; such individuals also quickly and easily form judgments about new players and coaches. Others, who have no evaluation of such basketball-related attitude objects available in memory, will have little reason to make evaluative judgments of such entities, and will find doing so difficult if and when the need arises. As a result of such varying interests and knowledge, people can vary in the extent to which they are, in effect, “attitudinally expert” in any given domain.

Thus, situations may vary in the extent to which they prompt attitude formation. Individuals vary in the extent to which they are generally predisposed to evaluate attitude objects, and individuals themselves exhibit varying degrees of attachment to various domains of attitude objects. For these reasons, considerable variability is to be expected across both people and attitude objects with respect to the strength of their attitudes. My colleagues and I have referred to such variation in the strength of object-evaluation associations as the attitude-nonattitude continuum (see Converse, 1970). Objects toward which an individual has no associated evaluation available in memory are characterized as falling at the nonattitude end of the continuum. When faced with an attitudinal inquiry or a decision, the individual is forced to construct an evaluative judgment “on the spot” using whatever relevant attributes of the object might be available in memory or in the current situational context. As we move along the continuum, an evaluation is now available in memory and the strength of the association between the object and the evaluation increases, as does the attitude’s capability for automatic activation. Thus, toward...

Table of contents

• Contents
• Preface
• 1 Accessible Attitudes as Tools for Object Appraisal: Their Costs and Benefits
• 2 The Social-Identity Function in Person Perception: Communicated Meanings of Product Preferences
• 3 Attitudes as Knowledge Structures and Persuasion as a Specific Case of Subjective Knowledge Acquisition
• 4 Cognitive Processes and the Functional Matching Effect in Persuasion: Studies of Personality and Political Behavior
• 5 Attitude Functions and Persuasion: An Elaboration Likelihood Approach to Matched Versus Mismatched Messages
• 6 Involvement and Persuasion: Attitude Functions for the Motivated Processor
• 7 Attitude Functions and Consumer Psychology: Understanding Perceptions of Product Quality
• 8 Opinions and Personality: On the Psychological Functions of Attitudes and Other Valued Possessions
• 9 What is a “Value-Expressive” Attitude?
• 10 A Motivational Approach to Experimental Tests of Attitude Functions Theory
• 11 Attitudes Toward Persons With HIV/AIDS: Linking a Functional Approach With Underlying Process
• 12 The Social Construction of Attitudes: Functional Consensus and Divergence in the U.S.Public’s Reactions to AIDS
• 13 The Functional Approach to Volunteerism
• 14 Attitude Function and the Automobile
• 15 Emergent Themes and Potential Approaches to Attitude Function: The Function-Structure Model of Attitudes
• Author Index
• Subject Index