Chapter 7: Attitudes

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Chapter 7 Attitudes
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Initial thoughts

• Attitudes and expression of identity
• Identity function
• Utilitarian function
• Interdiscplinary analysis
• Behaviorism
• Other fields

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Classic debate attitude neutrality (?)

• Neutrality vs. Ambivalence vs. No information
• Measurement?
• Societal value
• Possible?

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Why Neutrality is Difficult

• 1 Automaticity of attitudes

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2 mere exposure effect

• Zajonc (1968)
• The Turkish word study
• e.g., saricik, kadirga, ikitaf
• 0, 1, 2, 5, 10, or 25 exposures
• pronounce aloud each time
• Guess good vs. bad meaning

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Moreland and Zajonc (1973)

• Subliminal presentation (4 ms)

• Test phase
• old vs. and new symbols
• Recognition task chance level
• Liking old symbols preferred

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Additional information about mere exposure effect

• The effects of repeated exposure depend on
  initial appraisal of the stimulus

Initially liked, or neutral increased liking,
but Initially disliked increased disliking
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Classic Problems in Attitude Measurement

• Response alternatives not appropriate
• Acquiescence (yea-saying) biases
• Framing

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• Examples
• Abortion
• Pro-life vs. pro-choice fetus vs. unborn
  child, etc
• Cloning
• What is your attitude toward research on animal
  cloning?
• If research on animal cloning could be used to
  advance our ability to prevent cancer, would you
  be in favor of such research?

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• 4. Social desirability effects (Goffman, 1959).

Social desirability
true attitude
Fundamental problem how much of response is
due to one factor or other.
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Classic (older) approaches

• Vary context in which responses are made
• The Bogus Pipeline (Jones Sigall, 1971)
• Participants practice on machine, to convince
  that can detect truth from lying
• Then asked to express honest attitudes toward mix
  of new attitudes, some mundane, some socially
  sensitive

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Older approaches, continued

• Disguise/mask whats being asked
• Symbolic attitudes

Overtly expressed attitude A2
Underlying attitude A1
(socially unacceptable )
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examples of symbolic attitudes (Kinder, 1986)

• ____ students receive too much financial
  assistance from the university (Boneicki, 1998)
• Discrimination against Blacks is a thing of the
  past (McConahay, 1986)
• Downtown St. Louis has too much crime

Potential advantages vs. disadvantages?
Tradeoff efforts to disguise question threaten
construct validity
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Newer approach Implicit Attitudes

• Attitude object (prime) ? target
• Presentation of prime assumed to facilitate or
  inhibit response to the target
• Semantic priming
• chocolate? food (semantic priming)
• Evaluative priming
• chocolate ? good (direct)
• chocolate ? flower (indirect)
• chocolate ? disgusting

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Types of implicit priming tasks

• Lexical decision tasks decide whether target is
  a word or not

Word or non-word?
prime
target
decision
response
good
chocolate
RT measured
xxxxxxxx
good
response
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Lexical decision tasks, continued

• Construct facilitation indices
• RT (xxxxx ? good) RT (chocolate ?good)
• (500 milliseconds) - (200 milliseconds) 300
  ms
• 300 ms represents implicit attitude index

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Evaluative decision tasks

• Very similar to lexical decision, but judgmental
  decision different

Is it a good or a bad word?
prime
target
decision
desirable
response
chocolate
desirable
response
xxxxxx
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• some brief demonstrations

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Summary

• If A and B are associated in memory, then
  presenting A should make B more accessible
• Consequences of accessibility faster to decide
  if B is
• a word (lexical decision)
• positive or negative (evaluative decision)

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Why implicit attitudes potentially interesting

• Potential dissociation
• Conscious vs. unconscious
• Implicit attitudes less contaminated by
  self-presentational bias (?)
• Implicit attitudes purer measures of true
  attitudes (???)

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Strong argumentseparate systems view
Implicit tasks
Automatic (unconscious) system
Controlled (conscious) system
Explicit tasks
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The critics speak

• just another attitude measure
• predictive validity?
• see Lambert, Payne, Shaffer, Ramsey (2005)
• assumptions may be incorrect
• strong correlations sometimes found
• controllability of reactions to implicit tasks?
• No such thing as a process-pure measure
• Larry Jacoby
• No task 100 automatic
• No task 100 controlled

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More realistic view?
Implicit tasks
Automatic system
Explicit tasks
Controlled system
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Subliminal Advertising?
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Historical Background

• The James Vicary incident (late 1950s)
• Popcorn sales increase by 50, he says.
• Media reaction
• Minds have been broken and entered (The New
  Yorker, 9/21/57)
• The most alarming and outrageous discovery
  since the invention of the machine gun (The
  Nation, 10/5/57)
• FCC bans subliminal advertising

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Peoples current views toward subliminal vs.
regular advertising

• Subliminal ads feared more, believed to be more
  effective (Wilson et al. 1998)
• Subliminal self-help tapes
• 50 million as of 1990

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Evidence?

• Vicarys claims fabricated!
• No evidence that subliminal advertising works in
  real-life contexts
• Note Regular advertising EXTREMELY powerful, but
  people believe that they are immune to it (Wilson
  Brekke, 1994)

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Subliminal influence in laboratory
settingsgrowing evidence
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So why no evidence (yet) that subliminal
advertising works outside of the laboratory?

• Noisy contexts?
• Temporal distance?
• Fixed attitudes hard to change?
• Maybe does exist, just harder to measure

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Could subliminal priming be used to enhance
self-esteem?

• I like myself, but I dont know why Enhancing
  implicit self esteem by subliminal evaluative
  conditioning (Dijksterhuis, 2004)
• Modified lexical decision task
• The word I presented for 17 milliseconds,
  followed by
• 50 trials positive adjectives (e.g. Warm,
  sweet, nice, sincere, honest, beautiful,
  cheerful, smart, strong, wise, healthy, funny,
  nice)
• 50 trials non words
• Control participants positive adjectives
  replaced with neutral words (e.g. table)
• Results show enhanced self-esteem, immunity to
  failure feedback
• Replicates across six experiments

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Bush says 'RATS' ad not meant as subliminal
message Gore calls ad 'disappointing
development' September 12, 2000Web posted at
904 p.m. EDT (0104 GMT) ORLANDO, Florida (CNN)
-- Republican presidential nominee George W. Bush
said Tuesday he was "convinced" an ad placed by
the Republican National Committee that flashes
the word "RATS" over a Gore prescription drug
proposal was not intended to send a subliminal
message.    "We don't need to play cute
politics. We're going to win this election based
upon issues," Bush told reporters in Orlando.
Democratic presidential nominee Al Gore's
campaign contacted news organizations about an
RNC ad in which the word "RATS" appears briefly
on screen in a spot that criticizes Gore's
prescription drug plan. A spokesman for the Texas
governor on Tuesday brushed aside suggestions of
subliminal advertising as "bizarre and weird,"
while the RNC had no immediate comment.