On For Someone’s Sake Attitudes

Personal value, i.e., what is valuable for us (rather than value simpliciter), has recently been analysed in terms of so-called for-someone’s-sake attitudes. This paper is an attempt to add flesh to the bone of these attitudes that have not yet been properly analysed in the philosophical literature. By employing a distinction between justifiers and identifiers, which corresponds to two roles a property may play in the intentional content of an attitude, two different kinds of for-someone’s-sake attitudes can be identified. Moreover, it is argued that one of these kinds is particularly difficult to include in an analysis of value simpliciter but not in an analysis of value for.     

The Diagnosticity of Advertising Generated Brand Attitudes in Brand Choice Contexts

Advertising theory tends to presume, sometimes implicitly, that advertising mediates brand choice through its effect on brand attitudes. This article addresses the limitation of using brand attitude measures at or near the time of advertising exposure to predict the relative ability of a set of alternative advertising message appeals to directly influence brand‐choice decisions. The results suggest that the ability of advertising‐generated brand attitudes to predict advertising effects on brand choice declines when (a) consumers’ motivation to deliberate is greater at the time of brand choice than at the time of attitude formation, (b) the message appeal of the brand assigned the most favorable attitude rating is not accessible, not perceived to be at least as diagnostic as competitor appeals, or both, and (c) attitude differences among brand alternatives are small.     

The Attractions and Delights of Goodness

What makes something good for me? Most contemporary philosophers argue that something cannot count as good for me unless I am in some way attracted to it, or take delight in it. However, subjectivist theories of prudential value face difficulties, and there is no consensus about how these difficulties should be resolved. Whether one opts for a hedonist or a desire-satisfaction account of prudential value, certain fundamental assumptions about human well-being must be abandoned. I argue that we should reconsider Plato's objectivist theory of goodness as unity, or the One. This view is both consistent with and explains our most basic views both about goodness in general and human well-being in particular.     

The concept of attitude

Current conceptions of attitude do not adequately distinguish between attitudes and factual beliefs on the one hand, or between attitudes and preferences on the other. To hold an attitude is to ascribe an objective moral property to the attitude‐object; however, the conception of such properties rests on an incoherent theory of relations as constitutive of their terms, and the belief in them has only pseudo‐cognitive content. Moralism, or the maintaining of attitudes, is a special technique for disguising and promoting interests. Attitudes serve as rationalizations for concealed or unconscious impulses and are themselves defended by further rationalizations. These considerations call into question some common techniques of attitude‐assessment. Some apparent exceptions, namely ‘aesthetic attitudes’ and ‘authentic values’, reveal themselves to be either (a) factual beliefs about aesthetic properties or about human motivation respectively, (b) preferences, or (c) moral attitudes as defined. Moralism is not essential to socialization and is inimical to the ‘social feelings’.     

Off‐Target? Changing Cognitive‐Based Attitudes

Researchers argue that the effectiveness of cognitive versus affective persuasive appeals depends in part on whether the appeal is congruent or incongruent with a primarily cognitive or affective attitude base. However, considerable research suggests that these persuasion effects may hold only for predominantly affective attitudes and not cognitive attitudes. Indeed, results of Experiment 1 show that the relative effectiveness of congruent relative to incongruent persuasion appeals holds for brands with predominantly affective associations, but not those with predominantly cognitive associations. Experiment 2 explores one reason for this anomalous finding: Cognitive attitudes may be relatively impervious to persuasive appeals because the probability of targeting the specific attribute on which the cognitive attitude is based is smaller. The results are supportive, showing that significant persuasion effects are found when the specific beliefs on which cognitive attitudes are based are taken into account. However, these effects only occur under conditions of low cognitive load and not high cognitive load where resources for the cognitive processing of the appeals are limited. We discuss the implications of the research for the role of attitude structure in understanding persuasion effects and the interplay of affective and cognitive elements in persuasion processes.     

检验的临界值：真伪差距多大才能辨别？ ——评《不同条件下拟合指数的表现及临界值的选择》

Hu和Bentler（1998,1999）通过模拟研究推荐结构方程模型拟合指数临界值后,受到不少批评和质疑。此后有关拟合指数的研究重点不再是推出新的临界值标准。郭庆科等人的文章《不同条件下拟合指数的表现及临界值的选择》,仿照Hu和Bentler的做法,通过模拟研究推荐新的拟合指数临界值标准。本文旨在揭示这种做法的错误所在。用简单的Z检验,说明检验的临界值是不能通过模拟研究确定的。通过将一个特定真模型的众多错误模型分类,说明结构方程分析中真模型与错误模型差距的多样性,无法通过模拟一对真伪模型来代表。讨论了统计检验的本质和确定临界值的逻辑,还谈到应当从哪些角度检验和评价结构方程模型     

Double Denial in Attitude Formation1

While expressing their attitude toward an object, people sometimes deny both the probability of attributes that would speak against the attitude and the value of these attributes. We term this kind of functioning double denial. Double denial is incompatible with expectancy-value models of attitude formation. In eight studies of attitudes, values, and beliefs, there was clear evidence for double denial. The evidence was particularly strong for items measuring salient beliefs and for items and groups of participants yielding belief ratings that strongly correlated with attitudes. The results are interpreted in terms of the social functions of values and beliefs in the construing of arguments pro or con an attitude object. It is concluded that beliefs and values are dynamic entities, continually shaped in argumentation, and that expectancy-value models of attitude are inadequate to account for the relationships among attitudes, beliefs and values.     

Why ‘Appeals to Intuitions’ might not be so bad

Abstract

There has been lively recent debate over the value of appeals to intuitions in philosophy. Some, especially ‘experimental philosophers’, have argued that such appeals can carry little or no evidential weight, and that standard analytic philosophy is consequently methodologically bankrupt. Various defences of intuitions, and analytic philosophy, have also been offered. In this paper I review the case against intuitions, in particular the claims that intuitions vary with culture, and are built by natural selection, and argue that much of their force depends on assuming that the required sense of intuition is of a kind of human universal. In opposition to this view I argue that there is reason to regard intuitions of professional philosophers as parochial developmental achievements (so that cultural variation among non-professionals is irrelevant) and also the product of a training process that warrants ascribing some evidential weight to them. The argument made here is not anti-naturalistic, nor does it grant intuitions any special or trumping evidential status. Unlike some defences of analytic philosophy it does not depend on denying that philosophers appeal to intuitions at all.     

How Emotional Media Reports Influence Attitude Formation and Change: The Interplay of Attitude Base,Attitude Certainty,and Persuasion

This study examined the influence of an emotionally arousing writing style on attitude formation and change. It has been proposed that different writing styles induce attitudes based on either affect or cognition and with either high or low certainty. Previous work indicates that the interplay of these attitude characteristics determines the persuasiveness of emotional and rational media appeals. To test the hypotheses, participants in an experimental study read articles from a magazine about a fictitious attitude object. In the first step, 4 different types of attitudes varying in base and level of certainty were induced through a respectively manipulated article. In the second step, these attitudes were challenged by an additional article, which presented either an emotional or rational persuasive appeal. The results supported hypotheses on attitude induction through media stimuli and 3 of 4 hypotheses regarding the persuasiveness of emotionally and rationally written articles.     

Keeping a Place for Metaethics: Assessing Elliot's Dismissal of the Subjectivism/Objectivism Debate in Environmental Ethics

Abstract: Robert Elliot claims that the metaethical distinction between subjectivism and objectivism is unimportant in environmental ethics. He argues that because a sufficiently sophisticated subjectivist can accommodate all the intrinsic value an objectivist can, even in apparently problematic situations where humans either do not exist or do not have the relevant values, and because metaethical commitments fail to have any normative or motivational impact on rational debate, it makes no difference whether an environmental ethicist is a subjectivist or an objectivist. Elliot's dismissal, however, is unjustified. As it turns out, objectivists argue differently from the way subjectivists do, are motivated differently from the way subjectivists are, and are able to make a greater range of intrinsic value claims than subjectivists are. If Elliot's arguments have any appeal at all, it is only because he blurs the fundamental metaethical distinction in the first place and defends a subjectivism so objectivist that it is almost unrecognizable as subjectivism.     

Cognitive and affective matching effects in persuasion: an amplification perspective

Past research suggests that cognitive and affective attitudes are more open to change toward cognitive and affective (i.e., matched) persuasive attacks, respectively. The present research investigates how attitude certainty influences this openness. Although an extensive literature suggests that certainty generally reduces an attitude's openness to change, the authors explore the possibility that certainty might increase an attitude's openness to change in the context of affective or cognitive appeals. Based on the recently proposed amplification hypothesis, the authors posit that high (vs. low) attitude certainty will boost the resistance of attitudes to mismatched attacks (e.g., affective attitudes attacked by cognitive messages) but boost the openness of attitudes to matched attacks (e.g., affective attitudes attacked by affective messages). Two experiments provide support for this hypothesis. Implications for increasing the openness of attitudes to both matched and mismatched attacks are discussed.     

Reasons as the Unity Among the Varieties of Goodness

Our concepts of good simpliciter, good for, and good as a particular kind of thing must share some common element. I argue that all three types of goodness can be analysed in terms of the reasons that there are for a certain sets of agents to have pro‐attitudes. To this end I provide new and compelling accounts of good for and goodness of a kind in terms of reasons for pro‐attitudes that are more explanatorily illuminating than competing accounts and that evade the objections that undermine previous accounts of good for and goodness of a kind in terms of reasons.     

The Immorality of Having Children

This paper defends the Famine Relief Argument against Having Children, which goes as follows: conceiving and raising a child costs hundreds of thousands of dollars; that money would be far better spent on famine relief; therefore, conceiving and raising children is immoral. It is named after Peter Singer’s Famine Relief Argument because it might be a special case of Singer’s argument and because it exposes the main practical implication of Singer’s argument—namely, that we should not become parents. I answer five objections: that disaster would ensue if nobody had children; that having children cannot be wrong because it is so natural for human beings; that the argument demands too much of us; that my child might be a great benefactor to the world; and that we should raise our children frugally and give them the right values rather than not have them. Previous arguments against procreation have appealed either to a pessimism about human life, or to the environmental impact of overpopulation, or to the fact that we cannot obtain the consent of the non-existent. The argument proposed here appeals to the severe opportunity costs of parenting.     

Knowing our Reasons: Distinctive Self-Knowledge of Why We Hold Our Attitudes and Perform Actions

This paper argues that subjects at least sometimes learn why they hold an attitude or perform an action in a distinctive first-personal way, i.e., they learn of those facts in a manner that mere observers cannot. Subjects have this first-personal self-knowledge in virtue of first-personal self-knowledge of the reasons for which they hold an attitude or perform an action—their motivating reasons. This paper focusses on one’s reasons for holding an attitude. So, it is not just that subjects have distinctive access to the fact that they, say, believe that q; they also have distinctive access to the fact that they believe that p for the reason that p. I argue for this position contra the prevailing orthodoxy. Philosophers and psychologists often deny that subjects have distinctive access to why they hold their attitudes. Indeed, even many of those who claim that subjects can use a special method to learn that they have a given attitude deny that this method provides knowledge of why one holds that attitude.     

Value Relevance and the Value-Attitude Relation: Value Expressiveness Versus Halo Effects

This study examined whether considering the relevance of values to an attitude issue differentiated between two processes potentially underlying the relations between undergraduates' general value priorities and their attitudes toward capital punishment and affirmative action: value expressiveness, whereby attitude express values, and halo effects, whereby attitudes affect perception of values. In line with findings that indicate the attitudes of low self-monitors (SMs) are value expressive, while those of high SMs are not, the impact of value relevance on the value-attitude relation differed for high and low SMs. Low SMs' attitudes were correlated only with those values deemed relevant to an attitude issue, while high SMs' attitudes were related to both relevant and irrelevant values. Regression analyses revealed that controlling for the relation between low SMs' attitudes and irrelevant values slightly increased the relation between their attitudes and relevant values. Controlling for the relation between high SMs' attitudes and irrelevant values, in contrast, decreased the strength of the relation between their attitudes and relevant values. This suggest the magnitude of the relation between attitudes and relevant values, after controlling for the extent to which attitudes are tied to irrelevant values, may reflect the extent to which attitudes are value expressive. The implications of these findings for the methods used to change values and attitudes are also discussed.     

The effect of cultural values on pro-environmental attitude in the context of travel mode choice: A hierarchical approach

The cultural theory explains social behavior through four elementary types of cultural values consisting of hierarchy, individualism, egalitarianism, and fatalism. The knowledge of how these values influence attitudes and behaviors specifically pertain to the environment is limited. Understanding individuals’ values and attitudes should be addressed in travel mode choice based on possible impacts of transportation on the environment. This study investigates the effect of cultural values on pro-environmental attitude and the influence of this attitude on travel mode choice in light of a hierarchical latent choice model. The model is estimated using data from a random sampling in CBD (Central Business District) of Tehran, Iran. The pro-environmental attitude, which is postulated to be affected by cultural values, is considered as the latent variable directly affecting travel mode choice. The cultural values drivers of pro-environmental attitude have been seen in a hierarchical structure. The estimated results show that hierarchical cultural tendency has the strongest and positive effect on being pro-environmental. Also, individualistic culture indicates a positive trend in being pro-environmental. On the other side, people with egalitarianism value tend to report an orientation towards pro-environmental attitude. Moreover, pro-environmental attitude increases the utility of public and active modes of transportation and a negative significant effect is found on the utility of private car and motorcycle.     

Individualism and Authoritarianism Shape Attitudes Toward Physician-Assisted Suicide1

We investigated the relation between value orientations and attitudes toward physician-assisted suicide (PAS) in 267 United States college students. We predicted that individualistic values, especially those having to do with control and self-determination, would lead to favorable attitudes toward PAS, and authoritarianism would lead to a rejection of PAS. A positive association between individualism and approval of PAS emerged which was moderated by attitude importance: People who did not endorse individualistic values did not have favorable opinions of PAS, regardless of how important the issue was to them. However, for individualists, PAS attitudes and attitude importance were positively related. Independent of individualism, authoritarianism was negatively related to PAS attitudes. Primarily for low authoritarianism, we found a correlation between attitude and attitude importance. The discussion focuses on the value-expressive function of death-related attitudes.     

The Missing Link: On Strengthening the Relationship Between Values and Attitudes

Three experiments that test whether the activation of values may result in a change in the relationship between the activated value and connected attitudes are discussed. Participants were primed with the value universalism and subsequently asked for their attitude toward organically grown food. Our results strongly suggest that values are more likely to significantly influence attitudes when the relevant value is activated and the link between the activated value and attitude is activated as well. However, merely activating a specific value is not sufficient to instigate a significant change in the relationship between a value and its related attitudes.     

大学生地域歧视现象态度量表的编制及信效度检验

地域歧视现象的存在是违背和谐社会理念的,人们对此现象是什么态度?研究以费施贝因和阿扎吉提出的理性行为模型理论为基础,选取网络上最活跃的大学生为样本,编制了大学生地域歧视现象态度量表,构建了对地域歧视现象态度、对地域歧视者态度和对被歧视者态度3个维度。通过整理访谈资料、参考相关量表、专家讨论等方法编制条目。选取358名被试进行预测试,617名被试正式测试。研究结果表明,大学生地域歧视现象态度量表建构的3个维度结构合理,量表的项目分析、探索性分析和验证性分析符合心理测量学要求,是测量中国大学生地域歧视现象态度的有效工具。     

Consumer attitudes towards the future and some purchase patterns

The research detailed in this paper had two objectives. First, to carry out an exploratory analysis and a measurement of consumer attitudes towards the future (CATF). Secondly, to check whether a stronger or weaker attitude permits the detection of differences in some purchase patterns. After a review of the literature, an empirical study, representative of the Spanish population, is presented. A two‐dimensional structure of CATF and its acceptable goodness‐of‐fit with the statistical Weibull function were found. Hypotheses related to the adoption of purchasing patterns were also contrasted. The results disclose that a higher CATF is found when consumers have a clear idea of what they want to buy, are loyal to their usual outlets, prefer to pay cash and are not spendthrift. Finally, several future research directions are proposed. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.