February 21^st, 2000

Definitions of attitude:

Cognitive: A cognitive representation that summarizes an individual’s evaluation of a particular person, group, thing, action or idea (text)

Affective: A positive or negative feeling toward something

Behavioral: A predisposition to respond to an attitude object in a consistently positive or negative manner

--to approach/to avoid

Consistency important--attitudes do not change haphazardly

For a long time, social psych. considered study of attitudes (now recognized as an important subarea)

ATTITUDE MEASUREMENT:

Example: Attitudes toward women

A typical rating scale:

My feelings toward women are: Neg _____ _____ _____ _____ _____ Pos.

Problem: People can make same rating for very different reasons

A Likert attitude agreement scale:

Example:

A woman’s place is in the home:

A = Strongly disagree

B

C

D

E = Strongly agree

This type of scale is a ‘structured measure’ -- you only get to respond to the alternatives provided

A social distance scale:

Example: I think women should be allowed:

A) In my country

B) In my town

C) In my country club

D) To marry my brother

See which ones people endorse

Sentence stem completion:

Complete sentences such as “Women are ___________.”

Allows you to provide own true responses but hard to provide structure afterwards

__________________________________________________________________________

All of these measures are very transparent. OK if you are proud of your attitudes but some people do not want to express socially sensitive topics

A disguised measure:

Example:

The average woman has an IQ:

a) about ten points higher than average man

b) about ten points lower than average man

Assume if they choose a, that represents a positive attitude toward women

Assumption may not be valid

Feminists may choose b, but not because of a negative attitude toward women

The polygraph:

Measures galvanic skin response, respiration rate, heart rate and pulse

Needles do not always agree with each other

Study:

Look at polygraph results in comparison to actual evidence that is unequivocal

Find guilty people guilty 75% of time

Innocent people innocent 60%

Can also use guilty knowledge questions

Disadvantages: Most attitudes won’t show up on polygraph (not that extreme)

Pupillary dilation:

Measure pupillary dilation while showing people pictures of men and women

Disadvantage: constriction response hard to get

Response also has to do with colors

Incipient Facial Responses:

Use electrodes to detect barely detectable changes in facial expression while people look at pictures or respond to questions about att. Object

Disadvantage: This is difficult and time consuming

Though these physiological measures do not work well, people do not know this!

Bogus pipeline:

Hook people up to any fancy equipment and tell them it allows you to read minds

Then ask them to predict what you will find

Does this technique work? People more willing to report negative attitudes under this technique.

Implicit priming measure:

Assess the time required for people to recognize positive or negative words when they are preceded by subliminally presented photos of males or females

Implicit Association Test--given as example of implicit measure of attitudes