PSYC20009 Lecture Notes - Lecture 7: Bosson, Social Desirability Bias, Mahzarin Banaji
10 May 2018
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Week 7
- Attitude - associations between attitude objects and evaluations of those attitude
objects, how we evaluate things, positive or negative attitude towards attitude objects
- Attitude towards self = self-esteem, how we evaluate ourselves
- Negative attitude towards others or group = prejudice
- Attitudes has 3 components
- Affective component: liking or feelings about attitude object (think something is good
or bad, pleasant or unpleasant)
- Behavioural component: how we will behave towards attitude object (not how we
actually behave, when we encounter attitude object how we would behave towards it)
- Cognitive component: our thoughts and beliefs about the attitude object
- Chair (attitude object): Affective (I like chairs), Behavioural (I will sit on chairs),
Cognitive (chairs are useful or comfortable)
- Attitude properties: valence (overall evaluation, whether positive or negative, can
have degrees [strongly positive, very positive etc], extent to which attitude object is
viewed positively or negatively), strength (certainty or probability, how strong attitude
is, positive attitudes that are weak etc ), complexity (number of elements in attitude,
cats are furry, cuddly, sit in lap)
- Attitudes influence social cognition: the way we think about things in our social world,
can function as schema (coherent set of knowledge about something) for organising
and interpreting information about social objects
- Attitudes influence behaviour: believed that we would act in a way that is consistent
with our attitudes, relationship is complex (sometimes we don’t behave in ways
consistent with attitudes, at dinner party → don’t know anyone → sitting at table
discussing politics → all support party I don’t support → will not express attitude)
- Explicit measures: self-report measures (given piece of paper to fill in), Guttman
scales, Semantic Differentials, Likert scales
- Implicit measures: designed to measure attitudes we might not be aware of or willing
to report, will not report socially undesirable negative attitudes,first designed in 1995,
Implicit Association Test ( IAT), Go/No-Go Association Task (GNAT)
- Infer attitudes from observing behaviour
- Guttman Scale: presents number of items, person asked to agree or not agree, goes
from general to specific (gradually increase in specificity), rationale: people will agree
with all statements up to a point (more general statements people agree) then stop
agreeing, determine how extreme a view is, successive statements showing
increasingly extremist positions, the point where person no longer agrees is where
their attitude is, e.g. allow migrants to live in country, community, neighbourhood,
next door to you, allow child to marry migrant (least specific to more specific),
individual’s attitude is determined by point at which they no longer continue to agree
with the items
- Semantic Differential: developed by Osgood, attitude object, choose on bipolar scale
(adequate - inadequate, good-evil, valuable - worthless), indicate on that dimension
what you think of attitude object, Osgood performed factor analysis (way to see
which items go together, determine subscales, 20 items form 4 factors, based on
correlations between responses to items), found 3 factors, evaluation (good-bad),
potency (strong-weak), activity (active-passive), can be replicated cross-culturally
find more resources at oneclass.com
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- Likert scale: self-esteem questionnaire, statement - indicate degree of agreement
with statement, strongly disagree to strongly agree (1 to 5, 6, 7 or 9), 5 - 7 point
scales produce higher mean scores relative to highest possible attainable score
compared to those produced from 10-point scale, if lots of response levels → people
don’t use the last few, using more than 6 points doesn’t give more info, little
difference among Likert scale formats in terms of variation about mean and
skewness, Rosenberg self-esteem scale (most commonly used in the world, 4 point
Likert scale, strongly agree → agree → disagree → strongly disagree, 10 statements,
some are reverse coded, 1/2/4/6/7 are positively worded (i’m feel that I am a person
of equal worth, 9 (certainly feel useless at times ) → negatively worded → reverse
score → if strongly agree (change 1 to 4), in this case lowest score = highest self-
esteem
- Ajzen’s (1991) Attitude Measure: Theory of Reasoned Action - attitudes should be
measured by taking product of 2 factors (behavioural beliefs [beliefs of outcomes
associated with attitude objects, if behave a certain way towards attitude object → this
is what is going to happen, i can sit on chair] and outcome evaluations [sitting on
chair is good]), take product of each behavioural belief with its associated outcome
and take sum or mean of products
- Theory of planned behaviour: attitudes (behavioural beliefs x outcome evaluations);
subjective norms (social bit of model; normative beliefs [what others think we should
do; typically significant others e.g. boss, parents, GPs] x motivation to comply);
perceived behavioural control (addictions etc; control beliefs x influence of control
beliefs) → behavioural intentions → behaviour
- Behaviour is the focus, direct predictor is behavioural intentions, we form intentions
to engage in behaviours, intention influenced by 3 factors
- Perceived behavioural control → behaviour
- Reasoned action approach: includes descriptive norms - reflect our beliefs on what
other people should do
- Implicit measures: provide access to cognitive domain that may not be reached by
self- report measures (unaware or don’t want to report it), use performance on
experimental task, from responses get measures on attitude, IAT (most commonly
used) and GNAT, attitudes can be represented as network of variable-strength
associations among person concepts and attributes (including valences), concepts
are linked in memory, assess strength of associations among concepts and attributes
find more resources at oneclass.com
find more resources at oneclass.com
Document Summary
Attitude - associations between attitude objects and evaluations of those attitude objects, how we evaluate things, positive or negative attitude towards attitude objects. Attitude towards self = self-esteem, how we evaluate ourselves. Negative attitude towards others or group = prejudice. Affective component: liking or feelings about attitude object (think something is good or bad, pleasant or unpleasant) Behavioural component: how we will behave towards attitude object (not how we actually behave, when we encounter attitude object how we would behave towards it) Cognitive component: our thoughts and beliefs about the attitude object. Chair (attitude object): affective (i like chairs), behavioural (i will sit on chairs), Attitudes influence social cognition: the way we think about things in our social world, can function as schema (coherent set of knowledge about something) for organising and interpreting information about social objects. Explicit measures: self-report measures (given piece of paper to fill in), guttman scales, semantic differentials, likert scales.
