The effect of judges' attitudes on ratings of attitude statements. A theoretical analysis

Judgments of attitude statements with the method of equal-appearing intervals have been found to vary as a function of the judges' attitudes. In this paper explanations of the relationship between judges' attitudes and judgments of attitude statements in terms of models of psychophysical judgment are discussed. It is argued that psychophysical models such as adaptation-level theory, the range-frequency model, and the ‘rubber-band’ model and its derivations, cannot account satisfactorily for judges' performance of the attitude rating task in a great number of studies. The reason for this failure, it is argued, is that the stimulus series employed in the psychophysical judgment research on which these models are based typically varied only on the dimension being judged. The sets of statements judged in attitude rating studies, however, vary not only on the dimension of interest (favourability—Unfavourability) but also on a number of other dimensions. It is suggested that this incidental stimulus variation of attitude statements may account for the failure of psychophysical models to predict accurately the performance of judges in the attitude rating task. It is argued that if principles which could account for the effects of this incidental stimulus variation on attitude ratings could be incorporated into psychophysical models, the predictive qualities of these models could be improved considerably. One such model is discussed.     

Are the states underlying implicit biases unconscious? – A Neo-Freudian answer

Many philosophers as well as psychologists hold that implicit biases are due to unconscious attitudes. The justification for this unconscious-claim seems to be an inference to the best explanation of the mismatch between explicit and implicit attitudes, which is characteristic of implicit biases. The unconscious-claim has recently come under attack based on its inconsistency with empirical data. Instead, Gawronski, Hoffman, and Wilbur (2006) analyze implicit biases based on the so-called Associative-Propositional Evaluation (APE) model, according to which implicit attitudes are phenomenally conscious and accessible. The mismatch between the explicit and the implicit attitude is explained by the Cognitive Inconsistency Approach (CIA) (as I will call it): implicit attitudes are conscious but rejected as basis for explicit judgments because the latter lead to cognitive inconsistency with respect to other beliefs held by the subject. In this paper, I will argue that the CIA is problematic since it cannot account for the fact that implicit attitudes underlying implicit biases typically are unconscious. I will argue that a better explanation of the attitude-mismatch can be given in terms of a Neo-Freudian account of repression. I will develop such an account, and I will show how it can accommodate the merits of the APE model while avoiding the problems of the CIA.     

Stoic Conditionals,Necessity and Explanation

An examination of a particular passage in Cicero's De fato—Fat. 13–17—is crucial to our understanding of the Stoic theory of the truth-conditions of conditional propositions, for it has been uniquely important in the debate concerning the kind of connection the antecedent and consequent of a Stoic conditional should have to one another. Frede has argued that the passage proves that the connection is one of logical necessity, while Sorabji has argued that positive Stoic attitudes toward empirical inferences elsewhere suggest that that cannot be the right interpretation of the passage. I argue that both parties to the debate have missed a position somewhere between them which both renders a connection between antecedent and consequent that is not merely empirical and makes sense of the actual uses to which the Stoics put the conditional. This will be an account which grounds the connection between antecedent and consequent in a prolêpsis, a special kind of concept which plays a special epistemological role for the Stoics, especially in grounding scientific explanations. My contention will be that Stoic conditionals are true when there is a conceptually necessary connection between antecedent and consequent such that the former explains the latter via a prolêpsis     

‘Hate the sin but not the sinner’: forgiveness and condemnation

Abstract

Forgiveness is traditionally thought of as the forswearing of resentment. Resentment has been argued to be a moral emotion, tightly interrelated with moral protest against a wrongdoing. This has lead to forgiveness being thought of as the forgetting or condoning of wrongdoing. I will argue for a concept of forgiveness that is ‘uncompromising’ for it does not involve giving up one’s judgements about the wrongdoing. I will argue that resentment should be understood as a type of reactive attitude, and that this means that it is not necessarily connected with moral protest. I will show that forgiveness is better understood as the overcoming of reactive attitudes (which includes resentment, but also indignation, anger, and other similar emotions). This will allow for forgiveness to be compatible with maintaining condemnation of wrongdoing.     

An Agent-Centered Account of Rightness: The Importance of a Good Attitude

This paper provides a sketch of an agent-centered way of understanding and answering the question, “What’s wrong with that?” On this view, what lies at the bottom of judgments of wrongness is a bad attitude; when someone does something wrong, she does something that expresses a bad, or inappropriate, attitude (where inappropriateness is understood, tentatively, as a failure to recognize the separateness of others). In order to motivate this account, a general Kantian agent-centered ethics is discussed, as well as Michael Slote’s agent-based ethics, in light of analysis of the grounding role of attitudes in the evaluation of two core cases. In light of these discussions, it is argued that there are advantages to preserving the grounding of the appropriateness of attitudes in facts about their objects (as opposed to Slote’s sentimentalism), while cutting such an agent-centered ethics away from a Kantian grounding.     

Two Objections to Moran’s Transparency Account

Abstract

Gareth Evans and others have argued that our intentional attitudes are transparent to facts in the world. This suggests we can know them by looking outwards to the world rather than inwards to our minds. Richard Moran uses this idea of transparency in his account of self-knowledge. Critics have objected to his account on several counts. For example, Jonathan Way has argued that irrational attitudes can give ordinary self-knowledge when they are not transparent and that there are rational attitudes that are not transparent. I argue here that these objections fail because Way does not fully consider the two different kinds of self-knowledge, ‘ordinary’ and evidence-based, that differentiate the two stances that Moran claims a subject can have towards his attitudes. It is the differences between these two stances and the implications of these that motivate Moran’s account, rather than whether the formed attitude is rational or irrational, as long as the subject avows it from the deliberative stance, focuses on the attitude’s object and conforms to the transparency condition as Moran sets this out.     

Autonomy,Experience, and Reflection. On a Neglected Aspect of Personal Autonomy

The aim of this paper is to suggest that a necessary condition of autonomy has not been sufficiently recognized in the literature: the capacity to critically reflect on one’s practical attitudes (desires, preferences, values, etc.) in the light of new experiences. It will be argued that most prominent accounts of autonomy—ahistorical as well as history-sensitive—have either altogether failed to recognize this condition or at least failed to give an explicit account of it.     

Predicting Cigarette Use: The Need to Incorporate Measures of Salience in the Theory of Reasoned Action1,2

It is shown that incorporating a measure of belief salience in the theory of reasoned action improves both the model's predictive and explanatory power. It is demonstrated that the sum of the five evaluative-beliefs which are most salient for each person is more predictive of a semantic differential measure of that person's attitude than is the sum of the remaining nonsalient evaluative beliefs. In addition, it is shown that the perceived utilities of smoking are differentially salient for smokers and nonsmokers. It is argued that latitude of rejection, centrality, and certainty can be used as measures of the degree of definition of a person's attitudes and subjective norms. It is consequently predicted that these variables will be correlated and that attitudes and subjective norms which are well defined will be more highly predictive of a person's intention and behavior. While some support was found for these hypotheses, it is argued that the present results suggest that the relationship between these variables may be more complicated than was initially hypothesized.     

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.     

From attitudes to behaviour: Basic and applied research on the theory of planned behaviour

The present article traces the development of the theory of planned behaviour, from early research on the attitude-behaviour relationship through the theory of reasoned action. In particular, it is argued that a perceived lack of correspondence between attitude and behaviour led to examination of variables that either moderated (e.g., attitude strength, measurement correspondence) or mediated (behavioural intention) the relationship between attitudes and behaviour. Several meta-analytic reviews provide strong empirical support for the theory of planned behaviour, yet several applied and basic issues need to be resolved. The six papers that make up the remainder of this special issue address several of these issues.     

From attitudes to behaviour: Basic and applied research on the theory of planned behaviour

The present article traces the development of the theory of planned behaviour, from early research on the attitude-behaviour relationship through the theory of reasoned action. In particular, it is argued that a perceived lack of correspondence between attitude and behaviour led to examination of variables that either moderated (e.g., attitude strength, measurement correspondence) or mediated (behavioural intention) the relationship between attitudes and behaviour. Several meta-analytic reviews provide strong empirical support for the theory of planned behaviour, yet several applied and basic issues need to be resolved. The six papers that make up the remainder of this special issue address several of these issues.     

The Nature of Evil

Abstract

We readily claim that great moral catastrophes such as the Holocaust involve evil in some way, although it' not clear what this amounts to in a secular context. This paper seeks to provide a secular account of what evil is. It examines what is intuitively the most plausible account, namely that the evil act involves the production of great suffering (or other disvalue), and argues that such outcomes are neither necessary nor sufficient for an act to be evil. Only an appeal to distinctive patterns of motivation, so it is argued, will allow us to accommodate our intuitionsabout which acts are evil, and hence will provide an adequate account of the nature of evil.     

Accountability and the thoughts in reactive attitudes

As object-directed emotions, reactive attitudes can be appropriate in the sense of fitting, where an emotion is fitting in virtue of accurately representing its target. I use this idea to argue for a theory of moral accountability: an agent S is accountable for an action A if and only if A expresses S’s quality of will and S has the capacity to recognize and respond to moral reasons. For the sake of argument, I assume that a reactive attitude is fitting if and only if its constituent thoughts are true, and I argue for the above theory by determining thoughts partly constituting resentment and gratitude. Although others have argued that the capacity to recognize and respond to moral reasons is necessary for accountability, the argument here is significantly better in two respects. First, it does not rely on intermediary ethical principles, supplementary arguments, or assumptions about the nature of reactive attitudes specifically. Instead, it simply assumes that reactive attitudes, like all emotions, have cognitive content. Second, the argument here is more powerful because it brings to light the quality of will condition and has the resources to flesh out the capacity to recognize and respond to moral reasons.

     

Self-knowledge and commitments

In this paper I provide an outline of a new kind of constitutive account of self-knowledge. It is argued that in order for the model properly to explain transparency, a further category of propositional attitudes—called “commitments”—has to be countenanced. It is also maintained that constitutive theories can’t remain neutral on the issue of the possession of psychological concepts, and a proposal about the possession of the concept of belief is sketched. Finally, it is claimed that in order for a constitutive account properly to explain authority, it has to take a rather dramatic constructivist turn, which makes it suitable as an explanation of self-knowledge only for a limited class of mental states.     

Systematische Überlegungen zu Husserls Einstellungslehre

In this paper I sketch a systematic reconstruction of Husserl’s fundamental concept of “attitude”. I first explore Husserl’s account with respect to the three faculties of intellect, will, and emotivity [Gemüt], which also define the three basic kinds of attitude. The attitude assumed by the subject plays at this level the important role of articulating and unifying, according to an overall direction, various underlying moments of a complex act. I then focus on the specific intellectual, viz. cognitive attitudes and highlight the difference between the naturalistic attitude (which characterizes the natural sciences) and the personalistic attitude (which characterizes the human sciences). I then consider the notion of the natural attitude and argue that the personalistic attitude represents the systematic core of it. The natural attitude may be defined as the human attitude, i.e., as the attitude in which subjects posit themselves exclusively as human subjects belonging to the world, which is itself unceasingly posited as being. In the final part of the paper I explore the function of the phenomenological reduction insofar as it opens up a possibility of self-understanding that breaks with the natural, human self-apprehension and discloses subjectivity in its transcendental dimension. This opens up a radically new attitude, the phenomenological, which should not be confused with a first-person perspective within the framework of the natural attitude.     

A Chinese critique on Western ways of warfare

I will argue that there are two pervasive and enduring Western attitudes towards warfare: one involves the romanticism of violent conflict, the other concerns moral justification for it. These stand in sharp contrast to the traditional Chinese attitude as put forward in the Chinese classic treatises on warfare, the Sun‐tzu and Sun Pin. I will reference similar concerns articulated in the Taoist and, to a lesser extent, Confucian classics both to confirm and clarify this position. Using the combination of some of the most important and influential texts with the most relevant to our topic, I will attempt to identify and explicate what I will call “the traditional Chinese attitude toward warfare” as a critique of the two widespread Western attitudes. Finally, I will explore the implications of the West abandoning its romantic and moralistic attitudes.     

Interattitude Structure and Attitude Dynamics

Theories of attitude change have failed to identify the architecture of interattitudinal structures and relate it to attitude change. This article examines two models (a hierarchical and a spatial–linkage model) of interattitudinal structure that explicitly posit consequences for attitude change. An experiment (N= 391) was conducted that manipulated type of hierarchy (explicit versus implicit), whether the hierarchy was primed or not, and the location in the hierarchy to which a message was directed. Whereas the hierarchical model predicts only top–down influence of attitudes on each other, a spatial–linkage model predicts that linked attitudes may influence each other regardless of hierarchical position. The results support the spatial–linkage model in that interattitudinal change is constrained less by a concept's relative position in a hierarchical structure than by the concept's association with other concepts in that structure. Furthermore, within these interattitudinal structures, concepts directly targeted by a persuasive message often exhibit less attitude change than related concepts to which the focal concept appears to be linked. Finally, an explicit hierarchy of concepts appears to facilitate interattitudinal influence much more than an implicit hierarchy of concepts does; the key to this facilitation seems to be the mental accessibility of the organizational structure.     

University and student segmentation: Multilevel latent‐class analysis of students’ attitudes towards research methods and statistics

Background. It is often claimed that psychology students’ attitudes towards research methods and statistics affect course enrolment, persistence, achievement, and course climate. However, the inter‐institutional variability has been widely neglected in the research on students’ attitudes towards research methods and statistics, but it is important for didactic purposes (heterogeneity of the student population). Aims. The paper presents a scale based on findings of the social psychology of attitudes (polar and emotion‐based concept) in conjunction with a method for capturing beginning university students’ attitudes towards research methods and statistics and identifying the proportion of students having positive attitudes at the institutional level. Sample. The study based on a re‐analysis of a nationwide survey in Germany in August 2000 of all psychology students that enrolled in fall 1999/2000 (N= 1,490) and N= 44 universities. Methods. Using multilevel latent‐class analysis (MLLCA), the aim was to group students in different student attitude types and at the same time to obtain university segments based on the incidences of the different student attitude types. Results. Four student latent clusters were found that can be ranked on a bipolar attitude dimension. Membership in a cluster was predicted by age, grade point average (GPA) on school‐leaving exam, and personality traits. In addition, two university segments were found: universities with an average proportion of students with positive attitudes and universities with a high proportion of students with positive attitudes (excellent segment). Conclusions. As psychology students make up a very heterogeneous group, the use of multiple learning activities as opposed to the classical lecture course is required.