When linking is stronger than thinking: Associative transfer of valence disrupts the emergence of cognitive balance after attitude change

The present research investigated the role of cognitive balance vs. associative transfer of valence in attitude change. Participants first formed positive or negative attitudes toward several source individuals. Subsequently, participants were shown source–target pairs along with information about the source–target relationship (‘likes’/‘dislikes’). Afterwards, participants’ attitudes toward the sources were changed by means of information that was opposite to the initially induced attitude. In a control condition, initial source attitudes remained unqualified. Results in the control condition showed that initially formed attitudes and available relationship information produced target evaluations that were consistent with the notion of cognitive balance. However, when attitudes toward the sources changed, target evaluations directly matched attitudes toward individually associated sources, irrespective of the relation between source and target. These results suggest that associative transfer of valence can disrupt the emergence of cognitive balance after attitude change.     

Effects of negative ions on interpersonal attraction: evidence for intensification

In Study 1, female subjects received information suggesting either that a stranger (a female accomplice) shared their attitudes and evaluated them positively or that a stranger did not share their attitudes and evaluated them negatively. These procedures took place in the presence of a low (ambient) or high level of negative ions. On the basis of previous research, it was predicted that a high level of negative ions would intensify subjects' reactions to the stranger, thus enhancing their evaluations of her when she seemed to share their attitudes and to like them, but reducing these evaluations when she did not share their attitudes and disliked them. Results offered support for these predictions. In Study 2, female subjects performed two tasks (letter and digit copying) in the presence of a low or high concentration of negative ions. Their blood pressure and pulse were measured at several points during the experiment. Results indicated that on various trials both systolic and diastolic blood pressure were higher in the high-ions than in the low-ions condition. In addition, subjects reported higher levels of subjective arousal and made significantly more errors on the letter-copying task in the presence of a high concentration of negative ions. Together, the results of these studies were interpreted as offering support for the view that high concentrations of negative ions can increase both physiological and psychological (subjective) arousal.     

Attitude Change in a Realistic Experiment: The Effect of Party Membership and Audience Reaction During an Interview With a Dutch Politician1

In this realistic experiment, an interview with the leader of the Liberals in the Dutch Parliament was recorded in the presence of a live audience, which reacted in a positive, negative, or neutral way. It was shown to subjects of two opposing political parties, whose attitudes were to be changed by the experimental interview. The main hypothesis, which predicted more attitude change in the positive than in the negative audience condition, could not in general be supported. The alternative audience attraction hypothesis was mainly sustained: With an audience, perceived as attractive, attitude change was greatest when the audience reacted positively and least when it reacted negatively, while for an unattractive audience the opposite effect was demonstrated.     

Ideological self-schemata and schematically induced attitude consistency

This paper reports the results of a study which attempted to influence the level of expressed political attitude consistency by activating a “liberal-conservative” schema. The primary prediction was that attitudes elicited under direction of this general schema would be more mutually consistent than attitudes expressed without schematic direction. The results supported this prediction, but only for subjects who were “ideologically self-schematic,” that is, those subjects who defined themselves in adjectives which are characteristic of liberals or conservatives or who rated themselves on the extreme ends of a liberal-conservative self-rating scale. The results are interpreted as supportive of the generality of the effects of differences in the accessibility of specific constructs produced either by chronic individual differences or by trait priming.     

Petitioner's Attire and Petition Signing by Peace Demonstrators: A Field Experiment1

Two female experimenters, one dressed as a “hippie” and the other wearing “straight” dress, solicited signatures for an anti-war petition at the April 1971 Washington peace demonstration. Although the petition was identical in both conditions, and a large degree of attitudinal homogeneity in the subject population could be assumed, the hippie condition produced more signatures, more subjects who signed without looking at the petition, and attracted a larger number of unsolicited signatures. These differences were attributed to the effect of implied attitude (reference group) similarity between experimenters and subjects in the hippie and dissimilarity in the straight condition; in-group members were more effective than out-group members, despite experimenter-subject similarity in explicit attitudes under both conditions.     

I feel like I know you: sharing negative attitudes of others promotes feelings of familiarity

Holding similar negative-versus positive-attitudes toward a third party has been shown to predict increased closeness to a stranger. Here, the authors examined whether this effect is mediated by the heightened feelings of familiarity engendered by shared negative attitudes. In Study 1, participants who shared with a (bogus) stranger a negative attitude of a professor subsequently reported knowing more about the stranger than those who shared a positive attitude, but only when they did not feel strongly about the attitude. In Study 2, a familiarity manipulation produced high levels of closeness among participants who believed they had a lot of information about a stranger. Among those who believed they knew little about the stranger, closeness was facilitated by sharing a weakly held, negative attitude of a professor. Discussion considers the relevance of these findings to the interpersonal attraction literature.     

Dissonance motivation: Its nature,persistence, and reinstatement

This paper examines whether arousal is a necessary component of the motivation to reduce dissonance. Alternative responses to attitude-behavior inconsistency include attitude change, explaining the behavior by a consonant cognition (i.e., low choice), and attributing the dissonance-induced state to an alternative source, such as the purported side effects of an ingested “drug.” For conditions in which there are few consonant cognitions (i.e., high choice), a comparison of different “drug” conditions in which attitude change does or does not occur was expected to clarify which components of the dissonance-induced state mediate attitude change. Attitude change occurred in high choice conditions where the “drug” was described as pleasant, but not in high choice conditions where the “drug” was described as unpleasant or in a low choice condition. In addition, when the “drug” was descibed as arousing there was, if anything, more attitude change than when the “drug” was described as nonarousing. These results suggest that unpleasantness and not arousal per se is the motivating factor in dissonance reduction. The effects of the passage of time and reinstating the counterattitudinal behavior on the alternative responses to attitude-behavior inconsistency were also examined. Subjects returned 2 weeks later, stated their attitudes, recalled their original counterattitudinal essay, and again stated their attitudes. Although there was a general decrease in attitude change during this period, the pattern of attitude change remained basically the same. Attitude change following reinstatement increased from its original level only in those conditions where it had been initially attenuated through misattribution or a consonant cognition.     

Attitudes Toward Business as a Function of Student Quality and Career Intentions

This study sought to determine student attitudes toward business as a social institution, careers in business, and businessmen, and then to relate these attitudes to measures of career intention and student quality. A random sample of 91 subjects was administered a double pre-tested questionnaire after results of a pilot study were reviewed. Positive and negative attitudes toward business were analyzed following three popular hypotheses: the “values” hypothesis, the “seduction” hypothesis, the “grey flannel suit” hypothesis. A negative relation between student quality and intention to enter business careers was found. The most consistent underlying explanation for this result was found to relate to student values and motivations and not to attitude sources external to the individual.     

青少年对广告的态度及影响因素

通过对北京城八区11所中学的730个有效样本的研究分析,作者发现,北京青少年对广告的总体态度比较消极, 40.2%的青少年表示不喜欢广告, 27.9%中立,只有31.9%喜欢广告;此外,61.6%的青少年表示不信赖广告,24%中立,仅14.5%的青少年表示信赖广告。在对广告信念的因子分析中,青少年对广告“决策信息”功能表示基本肯定;对广告的“娱乐”、“购买体验”和“个人伤害”结果表示基本否定。此外,人口统计变量与广告总体态度以及各个因子之间有一定的关系。因此,要改变青少年对广告的消极态度,企业营销者需要从产品质量、广告表现形式、广告诉求内容等多个方面加以改善和提高。     

Implicit ambivalence from attitude change: an exploration of the PAST model

Traditional models of attitude change have assumed that when people appear to have changed their attitudes in response to new information, their old attitudes disappear and no longer have any impact. The present research suggests that when attitudes change, the old attitude can remain in memory and influence subsequent behavior. Four experiments are reported in which initial attitudes were created and then changed (or not) with new information. In each study, the authors demonstrate that when people undergo attitude change, their old and new attitudes can interact to produce evaluative responses consistent with a state of implicit ambivalence. In Study 1, individuals whose attitudes changed were more neutral on a measure of automatic evaluation. In Study 2, attitude change led people to show less confidence on an implicit but not an explicit measure. In Studies 3 and 4, people whose attitudes changed engaged in greater processing of attitude-relevant information than did individuals whose attitudes were not changed.     

Attitudinal effects of the use of evaluatively biased language

In an experiment to study the effects on attitudes of requiring subjects to use evaluatively biased language, 84 schoolchildren aged 13–14 years completed a questionnaire to measure their attitudes on the issue of adult authority over teenagers, before and after writing an essay on this issue in which they were either required to incorporate words from a list all of which implied a positive evaluation of a pro-authority position or a negative evaluation of an anti-authority position (pro-bias condition), or required to incorporate words where the implied evaluations were reversed (anti-bias condition), or were given no words to incorporate (control condition). Relative to controls, pro-bias subjects showed as a shift towards a more pro position and anti-bias subjects became more anti irrespective of their initial attitudes (pro-bias versus anti-bias comparison, p<.01). However, when tested 6 days later most of this effect had disappeared, particularly in the case of subjects whose initial attitudes were least pro. At this final session, subjects also rated attitude statements on the issue in terms of scales constructed from the pro-bias and anti-bias word lists. In accordance with previous research, the more pro subjects' attitudes, the more they showed greater polarization of judgement on the pro-bias than the anti-bias scales (p<.000l). It is concluded that a person's attitude may be related to the kind of evaluative language he will apply to an issue, and that when a person is induced to use language implying a particular evaluation of an issue, he may change his attitude, at least in the short term, so as to be more congruent with the language he has used.     

Attitudes to doctors and medicine: The preliminary development of a new scale

Abstract

The preliminary development of a new scale to measure attitudes towards medicine and doctors is described. The scale comprises four factors: “positive attitude towards doctors,” “positive attitude towards medicine,” “negative attitude towards doctors,” and “negative attitude towards medicine.” Alpha coefficients for the four scales were satisfactory, ranging from 0.69 to 0.76. Test re-test reliabilities ranged from 0.69 to 0.81. Evidence of criterion-related validity was obtained from comparison of the attitudes of five groups involved in health care: nurses, medical students, patients, and sociologists and psychologists who are teachers in medical schools. Patients and medical students held significantly more positive attitudes towards doctors and medicine that did nurses and behavioural scientists. While nurses were as negative towards doctors as sociologists and psychologists, they were significantly less negative about medicine.     

The effects of censorship and attractiveness of the censor on attitude change

The effects of censoring a communication, overriding the censor, and the attractiveness of the censor on the potential audience's attitude and desire to hear the communication were studied. Subjects were told that a speech which they were to have heard had been censored by a positively, negatively, or neutrally evaluated group. Some subjects were told that the experimenter had decided to override the censor and that they would hear the communication. Other subjects were told they would not hear the censored communication. The results indicated that censorship, regardless of the attractiveness of the censor, caused the potential audience to change their attitudes toward the position to be advocated by the communication and to increase their desire to hear that communication. These effects were interpreted as resulting from the arousal of psychological reactance. When the censor was overriden and the audience felt that they would hear the communication, their desire to hear it decreased. Further, subjects who had been told that a positively evaluated group had censored the speech changed their attitudes away from the position to be advocated by the communication while subjects who believed that a negative group had censored the speech changed their attitudes toward the position of the communication. These results were interpreted as evidence of cognitive balancing.     

Looking as a Measure of Attraction1

Byrne's reinforcement theory of attraction is almost exclusively based upon studies that use the Interpersonal Judgment Scale (IJS) as their measure of attraction. The present study used Byrne's general experimental procedure but employed an unobtrusive “looking” measure of attraction as well as the more familiar IJS measure. The degree of attitude similarity between women subjects and a female stranger was not significantly related to the IJS measure of attraction but was significantly related to the proportion of looking time measure (p < .01). This was true for both subjects who verbalized and did not verbalize awareness of the relationship between the independent variable and the dependent measures of the study.     

品牌态度强度与品牌态度可达性的关系性质

运用态度量表和反应时实验比较了品牌态度强度与品牌态度可达性的关系性质。研究发现,女性被试对保健品品牌要素的态度评价越肯定,态度通达和提取的时间就越快,两者之间形成有规律的函数关系;但在否定性态度条件下,没有出现类似的规律性;当要求被试把模糊性态度明确为肯定或否定态度时,67％的被试明确为否定态度,但所用时间显著慢于明确为肯定态度所用的时间     

Prediction as a means of inducing tolerance

Female subjects were exposed individually to the attitude item responses of a similar or dissimilar stranger. They were asked either to copy down the stranger's attitudes or to predict (with accurate feedback) how the stranger answered each item. Predict subjects were found to be more tolerant of the dissimilar stranger than were Copy subjects, while both groups were equally attracted to the similar stranger. It was suggested that training people to anticipate disagreements may be a useful way of fostering tolerance.     

Dissonance and self-perception: An integrative view of each theory's proper domain of application

The literature concerning the controversy between dissonance and selfperception theories is reviewed. It is proposed that the two theories be regarded not as “competing” formulations but as complementary ones and, furthermore, that each theory is applicable only to its own specialized domain. Self-perception theory, it is suggested, accurately characterizes attitude change phenomena in the context of attitude-congruent behavior and dissonance theory attitude change in the context of attitude-discrepant behavior. Attitude-congruent is defined as any position within an individual's latitude of acceptance; attitude-discrepant as any position in the latitude of rejection. An experimental test of these notions produced confirming evidence. Subjects who were given an opportunity to misattribute any potential dissonance arousal to an external stimulus did not change their attitudes, relative to low choice subjects, if they were committed to endorsing a position in their latitude of rejection. If the commitment concerned a position in the latitude of acceptance, however, these subjects did exhibit attitude change relative to low choice subjects.     

Social categorization and attitude change

Two experiments were carried out investigating the effect of categorization on attitude change. It was predicted that the division of a number of individuals into two subgroups (categorization), in such a way that initial attitudes correlate with subgroup membership, would lead to accentuation of attitudinal differences between subgroups. It was further predicted that an identical distribution of initial attitudes without superimposed categorization would lead to convergence of attitude positions. In experiment 1, the effect of a male-female classification on attitude change was studied. It was indeed found that subjects changed their attitudes in the direction opposite to the position of the outgroup (intergroup attitude differentiation), but only for groups who were initially more extreme than the comparison group. In the control condition (no categorization), conformity effects were observed. In experiment 2, an antagonistic intergroup setting was induced. In this situation, strong intergroup attitude differentiation effects were observed, which were not affected by the magnitude of the initial intergroup discrepancy. In the control condition, subjects did not show conformity to the overall group mean, but maintained their initial noncentral attitude position.     

Processes of Social Influence on Sampling Behavior: The Effect of Other's Positive Attitude and Receiver's Prior Experience

Studies about attitude formation have pointed out the importance of sampling behavior. When thinking about actual social interaction scenes, it may be better to consider them as attitude-updating processes between those who have already formed attitudes based on some experience. Sixty-five participants took part in the experiment, in which the other's positive attitude and the participant's own prior experience were manipulated. After participants had been presented five types of puzzles (experience: direct vs. indirect), which had been made to improve analytic ability, their attitudes towards the puzzles were measured (“pre attitude”). They were shown the other's positive attitude (inconsistent vs. consistent), and they were given 10 min of free time before “testing on their analytic ability.” The amount of time spent on each puzzle was recorded to index sampling behavior and the attitudes towards the puzzles were measured after the free time (“post attitude”). The results of analyses showed that the other's positive attitude increased sampling behavior when the participant's attitude was positive (first-ranked) and negative (fifth-ranked), and that prior experience and sampling contributed to attitude change for the first-ranked puzzle. Those who had had direct experience and those who had spent more time sampling this puzzle tended to maintain their previous positive attitude. The potential boundary conditions of social influence on sampling behavior are discussed.