Module 2 - Behavior, Attitudes, Culture, Attraction, and Intimacy

Chapter 5: Attitudes Behavior + Persuasion

• How the Obama Campaign Effectively Used Persuasion to Defeat John McCain
  • Online Cognitive + Emotional Persuasive Appeals
  • attitude inoculation: technique in which he warned his supporters that an ad attacking him would be coming, at the same time reminding them of ways to counterargue the ad.
• ABCs of social psychology—affect, behavior, and cognition
• Theories: self-perception theory and cognitive dissonance theory

5.1

Objectives
1. Define the concept of attitude and explain why it is of such interest to social psychologists.
2. Review the variables that determine attitude strength.
3. Outline the factors affect the strength of the attitude-behavior relationship.

• attitude: relatively enduring evaluation of something
• Some attitudes are more genetically predispositioned
• attitudes via cognitive, affective, behavioral components. Shaped by inherited, experiences, media, friends and can be shared or individual.
• attitude strength: importance of attitude (via how quickly comes to mind)
• attitudes can be increased via reinforcement and are even better when the ABC (affect/behavior/cognition) line up
• attitude consistency: attitudes tend to guide behavior
• The theory of planned behavior (Ajzen, 1991; Fishbein & Ajzen, 1975): important variables that affected the attitude-behavior relationship:
  • some factors summarized: - When attitudes are strong, rather than weak - When we have a strong intention to perform the behavior - When the attitude and the behavior both occur in similar social situations
    • When the same components of the attitude (either affect or cognition) are accessible when the attitude is assessed and when the behavior is performed
    • When the attitudes are measured at a specific, rather than a general, level
    • For low self-monitors (rather than for high self-monitors)

• Usually strong attitudes => strong intentions

• Attitude-Behavior Consistency:
  • Important the affective vs the cognitive factor more accessible: eg Cognitive vs Affective factors for liking a strawberry jam brand
• Self-monitoring: individual differences in the tendency to attend to social cues and to adjust one’s behavior to one’s social environment

5.2

Summary Takeaways

• Advertising is effective in changing attitudes, and principles of social psychology can help us understand when and how advertising works.
• Social psychologists study which communicators can deliver the most effective messages to which types of message recipients.
• Communicators are more effective when they help their recipients feel good about themselves. Attractive, similar, trustworthy, and expert communicators are examples of effective communicators.
• Attitude change that occurs over time, particularly when we no longer discount the impact of a lowcredibility communicator, is known as the sleeper effect.
• The messages that we deliver may be processed either spontaneously or thoughtfully. When we are processing messages only spontaneously, our feelings are more likely to be important, but when we process the message thoughtfully, cognition prevails.
• Both thoughtful and spontaneous messages can be effective, in different situations and for different people.
• One approach to improving an individual’s ability to resist persuasion is to help the person create a strong attitude. Procedures such as forewarning and inoculation can help increase attitude strength and thus reduce subsequent persuasion.
• Taken together, the evidence for the effectiveness of subliminal advertising is weak, and its effects may be limited to only some people and only some conditions.

Module 1 - Intro, Self + Beliefs

Textbook: https://open.lib.umn.edu/socialpsychology/