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Attitudes and Attitude Change: Social and Personality Considerations about Specific and General Patterns of Behavior Chapter · May 2018 CITATIONS

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Attitudes and Attitude Change

Attitudes and Attitude Change: Social and Personality Considerations about Specific and General Patterns of Behavior Dolores Albarracín, Man-pui Sally Chan, & Duo Jiang University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign

In Press, Deux & Snyder (Eds) Handbook of Personality and Social Psychology

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Abstract This chapter discusses the definition of attitudes as evaluations, with beliefs, intentions, goals, and behaviors as the psychological building blocks of attitude relevant processes. These considerations can take place at both the specific level of a single behavior (e.g., smoking) or at the general level of a pattern of behaviors (e.g., multiple behaviors). Classic and contemporary attitude scholarship has provided a theoretical understanding of prediction and change in behavior at both the specific and broad levels of analysis. Personality instruments have contributed to identifying trait associations with specific attitude processes, including structure, functions, and bases, as well as attitude and belief change. Future personality research, however, would benefit from adopting attitude models that clearly distinguish psychological building blocks rather than confound feelings, thoughts, and behaviors as being equivalent or equally close to behavior endpoints.

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Attitudes and Attitude Change: Social and Personality Considerations about Specific and General Patterns of Behavior A quick look at the front page of the New York Times shows the following headlines: 12 Oscar Nominations for The Revenant Syrians Tell a Life Where Famine is a Weapon Cruz Did Not Report Goldman Sacks Loan in Senate Race What to Expect of G.O.P. Deba: Escalating Attacks Terrorists Attacks Kill at Least Two in Jakarta, Police Say Each and every headline connects with attitudes, defined as evaluations that drive human action, and in some of these cases, inaction. Attitudes are not only part of the news consumed worldwide, but they are also a subject of general interest that has increased over time. For example, Google searches for the term attitude show that interest in the term doubled since 2004. As another example, a recent search of Amazon.com produced over 30,000 books containing attitude in the title, reflecting a high level of popular concern with the subject. The topic of attitudes is also particularly pertinent to this handbook because the psychology of attitudes is often a social/personality psychology of attitudes. Clearly, cognitive psychology has contributed to our understanding of the micro-processes involved in the formation of judgments, and biological psychology can account for the sensorial mechanisms underlying preferences for colors, tastes, or smells. There is, however, a reason why attitudes have been a focus in social psychology: Attitudes are often learned from others, make individuals similar to members of their groups, and are affected by social pressure and by persuasion (i.e. the act of attempting to change the attitudes of another

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person). However, personality considerations are also prominent. Attitudes are seen as a product of experience leading to individual differences and stemming from general, stable personal dispositions. Further, situational experiences, interactions with others, persuasive communications, and formal education shape attitudes throughout the lifetime, but personal factors, including personality traits, are likely to pose a ceiling to the degree of situational social influence that can be observed. This chapter discusses classic and contemporary questions about attitudes, trying to compare and merge a social perspective with a personality perspective. As shown in Figure 1, we consider attitudes in relations to beliefs, intentions, goals, and behaviors, and also discuss the processes of attitude formation and change. Social and personality influences are conceptualized as exerting main and interactive effects on judgment and behavior (see Chapters XX in this volume). In our analysis, situational pressures and personality are often assumed to exert direct influences on attitudes, following a main effects type of model. A more nuanced consideration, however, recognizes that the influence of situational pressures on attitudes is likely to be stronger when people chronically worry about conforming to social norms. In this case, situational pressures are conceptualized as interacting with personality factors that also shape attitudes. This is represented in Figure 2. This chapter first discusses the building blocks of the psychology of attitudes. Specifically, after introducing attitudes, we define behavior, beliefs, intentions, and goals as critical concepts that have received the attention of both social and personality psychologists. This attention is in part due to the recognition that attitudes, beliefs, and intentions/goals are all represented in relation to specific objects but also transcend these objects. Therefore, the same psychological factors that explain attitudes in social psychology are relevant to understand affective traits and dispositions in the domain of personality

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psychology. The area of attitude measurement has also shown cross-fertilization between the two fields, as discussed presently.

Figure 1: Belief, Attitude, Intention/Goal, and Behavior. Specific and General Levels

The Building Blocks of the Psychology of Attitudes: Key Concepts, Measurement, and Contributions of the Social and Personality Fields Figure 2 shows a sequence of psychological processes that readers should find relatively noncontroversial. Beliefs are subjective probabilities that an event, object or person are linked to an attribute. These often serve as the basis for attitudes, which are defined as evaluations. Attitudes can give way to the intention to act in a particular way and ultimately to behavior. Thus, the top half of Figure 1 presents a model in which psychological judgments about a specific target ultimately lead to behavior towards the target. In contrast, the bottom half presents the same sequence of psychological processes general to many targets. People may be chronically skeptical and manifest disbelief in many contexts. People may dislike most objects and persons in their words. People may strong goals, or set achievement goals across life domains (e.g., work, sports, finances). In Figure 1,

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however, the same building blocks of attitudes can be used to explain broad patterns of cognition, affect, and behavior, often referred to as personality. In the next sections, we define each building block and illustrate its relevance at both the specific and the general level.

Figure 2. The Influences of Personality and Situation

Attitudes toward Specific Targets and Dispositional Attitudes A definition of an attitude needs to be sufficiently comprehensive to cover the extent of current literature, and sufficiently generalizable to remain useful with evolving research trends (Eagly & Chaiken, 2007; Gawronski, 2007). What has been consistent in the multiple conceptualizations of the attitude construct is that evaluation is the key component (Ajzen, 2001; Albarracín, Zanna, Johnson, & Kumkale, 2005; Eagly & Chaiken, 1993; Gawronski, 2007; Maio & Haddock, 2009). Thus, in this chapter we too define attitude as evaluation. The target or subject matter of an attitude can be an object, a person, or an abstract idea. Attitudes towards objects span many applications of social psychology to such domains as marketing (e.g., attitudes towards products), advertising (e.g., attitudes towards

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ads), political behavior (e.g., attitudes towards political candidates, parties, or voting), and health (e.g., attitudes towards protective behaviors, new medications, or the health system). Attitudes towards other people are often investigated under the umbrella of interpersonal liking. Attitudes towards abstract ideas involve values, such as judging freedom or equality as desirable. Attitudes vary in terms of specificity vs. generality (see also Ajzen, 2012). An attitude towards Donald Trump is specific in target (e.g., his hairdo comes to mind), but many attitudes are general. For example, some individuals hold relatively positive attitudes towards all objects, whereas others dislike most people, objects, and ideas (Hepler & Albarracín, 2013). Further, attitudes concerning an object can have different degrees of specificity with respect to temporal and spatial contexts (see Ajzen & Fishbein, 2005; Fishbein & Ajzen, 1975). For example, receiving the flu vaccine in the next month represents less commitment than consistently receiving the flu vaccine every fall. Likewise, receiving the flu vaccine in Chicago may seem more desirable than receiving the flu vaccine while vacationing in the South Pacific. At the general level, individuals differ in their dispositional tendency to like or dislike stimuli in general, which Hepler and Albarracín (2013) termed dispositional attitude. A measure of the dispositional attitude positively correlated with traits linked to positive affect (e.g., extraversion, agreeableness, trait positive affect, optimism, self-esteem, life satisfaction, behavioral activation, and promotion focus) and negatively correlated with traits signaling negative affect (e.g., neuroticism, trait negative affect, behavioral inhibition, and prevention focus) (Hepler & Albarracín, 2013). Moreover, this general attitude across objects successfully predicts attitudes towards objects, as well as the number of behaviors enacted during a week (Hepler & Albarracín, 2013, 2014). Other relevant work conducted

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by Pietri, Fazio, and Shook (2013) has shown a general negativity bias by which people generalize negative attitudes to similar but novel stimuli to a greater extent than they do positive attitudes. Thus, mechanisms of learning and generalization are useful to understand how specific attitudes are applied to new objects and ultimately become general or dispositional. Behavior, Beliefs, Intentions, and Goals at the Level of Specific Objects and Dispositions: Definitions and Degree of Association Behavior is typically defined as the overt act of an individual (Albarracín et al., 2005) and is generally assumed to partly stem from attitudes. One of the earliest studies looking at the association between attitudes and behavior was conducted by LaPiere (1934). LaPiere travelled across the United States with a young Chinese couple and found that, despite widespread anti-Asian prejudice, only one establishment refused service to him and his companions. Several months later, LaPiere sent out a letter to the establishments he visited and asked whether they would accommodate Asians as guests. Because only one respondent indicated that they would, the study was presented as a demonstration of a weak relation between attitudes (the racial prejudice) and behaviors (rejecting Asian patrons). LaPiere's study, however, suffered from important methodological flaws. One was that LaPiere was unable to ensure that the individual who served him and his companions was the same individual who answered the letters. In fact, considerable research on the attitude-behavior relation now indicates that attitudes are fairly good predicts of behaviors. For example, a meta-analytic review of the literature found that the average correlation between attitudes and behavior is r = .52 (Glasman & Albarracín, 2006), and that this association varies with a number of established situational and personal moderators. As

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discussed next, this strong correlation is particularly the case when predicting specific behaviors from specific attitudes (see top panel of Figure 1). The association between attitudes and behaviors depends on the level of generality of the two. Specific attitudes predict specific behaviors, and broad attitudes predict broad behavior patterns. A now classic study of this problem was conducted by Fishbein and Ajzen (1974) to compare prediction of specific behaviors and multiple behaviors as a function of attitudes towards a specific object. Attitudes towards religiosity were measured with five different types of scales, including simply self-reporting attitudes towards being religious, a measure composed of five semantic differential scales (e.g., good-bad; harmful beneficial), a Guttman scale, a set of Likert scales, and a Thurstone scale. Measures of 100 behaviors were also included, all of which tapped some aspect of religious behavior, including praying before meals, attending religious services, and donating money to religious organizations. Participants reported whether they did or whether they would do each of these behaviors, which were used as respective measures of behaviors and intentions. Each of these behavioral measures was then the based on single-act correlations with attitudes, testing the prediction that specific behaviors will have a low mean correlation with the attitude towards religiosity. The correspondence for all attitude scales appears in Table 1 and revealed very small correlations when a single behavior was predicted. However, the results in Table 1 also suggest that raising the level of generality of behavior matters. The bottom, general panel of Figure 1 can also produce strong correlations as long as the behavioral indexes are multi-act, or, in other words, measured at a general level.

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Table 1 Prediction of Behavior and Intention from Single and Multiple Act Attitude Measures Scale Predicting Predicting behavior intention Single act Multiple act Single act Multiple act Self-report .14 .64 .16 .60 Semantic differential .15 .71 .18 .66 Guttman .12 .61 .18 .66 Likert .14 .68 .20 .75 Thurstone .13 .63 .17 .65 A belief can be defined as a person’s subjective probability of a relation between the object of the belief and some other object, value, concept, or attribute, and affects people’s understanding of themselves and their environments (Fishbein & Ajzen, 1975). Just like with the association between attitudes and behaviors, specific beliefs correlate well with specific attitudes. In the domain of attitudes towards condom use, for example, the mean association between outcome beliefs and attitudes towards condom use is r = .57. A conceptualization proposed by McGuire (1960) and extended by Wyer and Goldberg (1970; see also Wyer, 1974) addressed how prior beliefs can influence new beliefs and attitudes. McGuire (1960) stated that two cognitions, A (antecedent) and C (conclusion), can relate to each other by means of a syllogism of the form A; if A, then C; C. This structure implies that the probability of C (e.g., an event is good) is a function of the beliefs in the premise or antecedent, and beliefs that if A is true and if A is true, C is true. Further, Wyer (1970; Wyer & Goldberg, 1970) argued that C might be true for reasons other than those included in these premises. That is, beliefs in these alternate reasons should also influence the probability of the conclusion (not A; if not A, then C). Hence, P(C) should be a function of the beliefs in these two mutually exclusive sets of premises, or: P(C) = P(A)P(C/A) + P(~A)P(C/~A),

[1]

where P(A) and P(~A) [= 1-P(A)] are beliefs that A is and is not true, respectively, and P(C/A) and P(C/~A) are conditional beliefs that C is true if A is and is not true, respectively.

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Two additional concepts are central to the psychology of attitudes: Intentions and beliefs. An intention is a willingness to perform a behavior. Intentions often emerge from broader goals – desirable endstates – that can be achieved via multiple, sustained behaviors, are not fully controllable results, and require external help or resources (Ajzen & Fishbein, 2005). For example, people develop intentions to increase physical activity with the goal of losing weight, but executing the intended behavior is no guarantee of success. Although behavioral intentions are specific, goals can be specific or general, just like attitudes. On the one hand, attitude-behavior researchers have generally studied fairly specific goals, such as the goal to quit smoking (see Ajzen & Fishbein, 1980). When set, these goals are facilitated by intentions to perform specific actions, like throwing away smoking related paraphernalia or avoiding friends who smoke. The intention to quit smoking or achieve a similar goal is an excellent predictor of actual behavior. For example, meta-analyses of specific health behaviors, such as condom use and exercise, have yielded average intention-behavior correlations ranging from .44 to .56 (Albarracín, Johnson, Fishbein, & Muellerleile, 2001). Furthermore, correlations between general attitudes and patterns of behavioral intentions are also high. The right panel of Table 1 shows that the multiple-act intention indexes correlated with general attitudes towards religiosity between r = .60 and .75. The high correlations between general attitudes and patterns of behaviors and intentions (see Table 1) contrast with the very low correlations typically obtained by personality researchers. For example, personality researchers have studied more general goals such as the achievement motivation or the affiliation need (Elliot & Church, 1997; Maslow, 1970). The moderate correspondence between these goal measures and behavior (e.g., r = .36 in Elliot & Church, 1997) is probably due to two problems. First, researchers

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measure a specific behavior of interest, whereas behavioral patterns are best observed over long periods of time and across many domains. Further, personality measures typically include items that relate to thoughts, affective feelings, attitudes, and behaviors that are all relevant to a trait. Therefore, the conceptual correspondence between these different items and behavior is not taken into account. Thoughts may be analogous to beliefs and thus have very indirect and thus weak effects on behavior (see Figure 1). Feelings may have even less direct effects on behavior, thus lacking validity as predictors. Perhaps the most general class of all investigated goals (see Albarracín et al., 2008; Albarracín, Hepler, & Tannenbaum, 2011) entails general action goals, which are generalized goals to engage in action (e.g., activated with instructions such as go), as well as general inaction goals, which are generalized goals to not engage in action (e.g., activated with instructions such as rest). These goals are diffuse desired ends that can mobilize the execution of more specific activities. Hence, their activat...