Lecture 2, reading 1 Albarracin, Shavitt,
2018
The concept of attitudes:
A person’s evaluation of an object or idea on a favourable to non-favourable continuum. Attitudes have a
subject matter, which can be used in many disciplines.
Why important to marketing/consumer behaviour? When a person evaluated a brand/product badly, they
establish a negative mindset towards it.
Attitude change:
How something influences attitude can be referred to as attitude change. Attitude can change, though the
extent to which it changes depends. The degree to which attitude change is modest, about 1/3 of a standard
deviation.
The degree of attitude change depends on whether one adopts a theoretical conceptualization of attitudes as
1) crystallized in memory, 2) in-the-moment evaluation and 3) hybrid structures.
Example: Millennials are more self-focused and individualistic compared to previous generations. Therefore, they may have positive
attitudes towards money, fame, social image compared to other generations.
When attitudes are fixed in memory (stored permanently and later retrieved), attitudes are difficult to change
and explain. When attitudes are temporary considerations (e.g. mood), attitudes are continuously changing.
Most likely, attitudes are partly memory based and partly constructed in the moment: consistent with
contemporary understanding of information processing as a neural network, in which activation patterns stem
from situational constraints.
Three contexts relevant for attitudes:
Last years showed a shift from a focus on microprocesses to a more holistic, contemporary understanding of
attitudes as they exist in three fundamental contexts: (1) the person as a whole, in relation to values, broad
goals, language, emotions, other attitudes, and the lifespan; (2) the social context, including communicators, as
well as social media and social networks; and (3) the broad context, particularly the sociohistorical context, in
relation to the generational, cultural, and historical backdrop of attitudes. These three contexts are the same as
micro, macro and meso level from the course scheme.
1) The person as a context: the powerful role of a person’s values, general goals, emotions, etc. in shaping their
attitudes and persuasion processes.
Context of values: values exist within a motivational structure, often linking values to supporting policies. E.g. high security values: support
a party assuring safety and stability for the environment. Binding values involve ingroup loyalty, authority, respect, and purity. The
influence of values on attitudes appears to interact with prevailing social norms (shared societal/situational expectations shaping attitudes
and behaviour). Both self-interest values and moral values can legitimize attitudes and make it subjectively appropriate to act on those
attitudes.
Context of goals: attitudes can serve action goals; when considering a behavioural goal, it reminds us what we like and dislike about
execution and outcome of behaviour. General action relates to cognitive output (acquiring knowledge) and general inaction to lack of
action. General action and inaction can be set to guide people toward activity or inactivity end-states, achieved by temporarily accessible or
chronically available behavioral means. These action and inaction goals have important implications for attitude activation and change.
Context of languages: the use of metaphors impacts attitudes. Example, reading about the police as either guardians or warriors led to,
respectively, more and less liking for the police.
Context of emotions: even though emotions are relevant to many attitudes, they appear to be particularly relevant to political attitudes of
various types. Example: during Corona it depends if people agree or not with Rutte, which is their attitude in emotions like anger/anxiety.
Context of other attitudes and evaluative processes: general or dispositional attitude: attitudes that characterize the person as evaluating
most objects positively, neutrally, or negatively. Kind of refers to how one looks at/evaluates life in itself, in which their attitudes about
objects will probably be similar as well.
,Context of development: developmental stage and childhood socialization is another fundamental context in which attitudes are shaped
and reshaped. There’s a shift in attitudes due to lifespan (e.g. change in music likings). Also attitudes related to the self (self-esteem) is
related to age: more self-esteem within 20’s, then decrease when reaching an older age: decline in health and socioeconomic status.
2) The social context: the role played by the views of others, being friends, network, social media.
Social media and social networks: popularization of online world, e.g. video games can affect aggression. Social media can affect body
dissatisfaction, campaigns around body positivity. Network effects: observed behavioural similarities among socially connected people.
The communicator: persuasive communications entail an implicit or explicit interaction with the source of the message. High-power
communicators tend to generate messages prioritizing competence information (more persuasive to high-power audience), low-power
communicators tend to generate messages with warmth, persuasive for low-power audiences.
3) The historical context: achieving a holistic, contextualized understanding of attitudes requires consideration
of the generational, historical and cultural shifts that shaped individual evaluations.
Generational context: generational differences arise from (and reflective of) broad sociocultural changes in time periods. How generations
differ in their way of thinking, expect from their own cohort (group born in same generation). Example: Millennials increasingly tolerating
attitudes towards non-gender roles, same-sex marriage and decreased religious beliefs.
Climatic and historical events as context: major climatic or social occurrences: when Obama became US president, white’s beliefs about
black’s went from ‘stupid to intelligent’ and ‘lazy to hardworking’. Attitudinal shifts referred to as Obama effect: ethnic diversity among
those who hold powerful positions can revolutionize social attitudes.
Culture as context: cultural factors can influence information processing strategies, shaping thinking styles, general goals and the role of
feelings and metacognitive experiences in decision-making. Most work focuses on distinctions between independent and interdependent
self-construals, individualistic and collectivistic cultural backgrounds and orientations, or Western and non-Western cultural contexts.
Individualism: cultural value system emphasizing the importance of self-reliance and independence and the pursuit of personal goals over
the ingroup’s goals Collectivism: cultural value system emphasizing pursuit of group goals, harmony, interdependence with others, and
maintenance of strong relationships
Lecture 2, reading 2 Bohner, Dickel, 2011
Concept of attitudes: an evaluation of an object of thought.
Differences between functional and constructionist view: Some models are based on attitudes being
constructed on the spot (constructionist view) and other more stored in memory (functional view).
Functional view (stable-entity): see attitudes as stable, stored in memory and long-term
Constructional view: see attitudes as changeable, constructed on the spot and evaluative judgements sensitive to context
Functional view: memory-based summary evaluations that are easily retrieved to evaluative judgments that are
constructed from currently accessible information.
Constructionist view: all attitude change must be conceptualized as differences between repeated instances of
attitude formation, whereas a strictly memory based model would have to posit that old attitudes are taken
out of their mental file-drawers and replaced by new ones.
Measures of attitudes
Implicit Association Test (IAT): participants repeatedly press left or right keys to sort stimuli in dichotomous
categories (male-female), and evaluative categories (positive-negative). After first test, the critical block changes
options. The response time difference between the tests is used as an indicator of automatic evaluation.
Vaak ingezet bij onbewuste vooroordelen. Voorbeeld: vrouw-gezin, man-carriere. Later: man-gezin, vrouw-carriere. Response time die
wordt gemeten laat iemands automatic evaluation zien. People who respond faster to e.g. first block, displays a more positive implicit
attitude toward women than men.
Evaluative priming task: participants press keys to evaluate target stimuli (e.g. adjectives/words), which are
preceded by primes, representing attitude objects. If the evaluations of the prime & target match, response
time is reduced. Mismatch: prolonged. The difference indicates a difference in automatic evaluation of the
prime attitude object.
,Example: a person responding faster to trials with old faces and positive adjectives or young faces and negative adjectives, than to trials
with the reverse combinations would display an implicit preference for old faces.
The previous sections show that conceptualizations of attitude differ in the extent to which they describe attitudes as being constructed
on-line or stored in memory. Attitudes can be measured by using explicit self-report instruments or implicit response-time-based
measures. These differences in attitude conceptualization and measurement bear on the theoretical understanding of attitude change
Attitude change:
Constructionist perspective: attitude change results from a different set of information being activated and considered at
the time an attitude judgment is made.
Filedrawer/functional: attitude change reflects a change in the underlying memory representation of the attitude in
question.
PAST Model: past attitudes are still there
Within this memory-based conceptualization, old attitudes are stored in memory as new attitudes form. This
leads to dual-attitude for the same object. Old values are either stored as valid or invalid.
Attitude change involves both the retrieval of stored evaluations and the consideration of new, evaluative
information to varying extents.
Example: smoking, before attitude change was seen as good/tasty thing. After processing a persuasive communication about the health
hazards of smoking, this person may form a negative attitude; the former positive attitude, will remain stored and be tagged as invalid.
ELM Model: elaboration likelihood model
Model focuses on the ways that consumers respond to communicative messages. Relevant information
towards an object can be either processed at high or low levels of effort.
Elaboration continuum: describes the amount of thought (elaboration) given to an advertising message or
persuasive communication. Ranges from high (deep, critical engagement) to low (less engagement), and the
ways in which information is processed will depend on the engagement level.
High elaboration (greater thinking and engagement) leads to central route processing. Tends to accompany highly
involved consumer situations. These consumers are likely to pay attention to the information and then carefully evaluate new information
in relation to existing knowledge. Based on that, develop an attitude on logical reasoning.
Central route processing: when consumers are motivated to pay attention to an ad, they consciously think about it and tend to take a
logical decision making route. Example: Olympus camera: ad on itself was informative and illustrative, though had a QR code involved to
encourage deeper engagement.
Low elaboration (less thinking) leads to peripheral route processing. People are less likely to pay attention to persuasive
messages; make less effort to evaluate new information and bring less of their own information to bear in forming their attitude.
Peripheral route processing: consumers pay less attention to the persuasive arguments in ads, but are influenced by surface (basic)
characteristics of the ad/product. Emphasis is on images and the use on emotional connections.
Understanding the route to persuasion encourages deeper appreciation of circumstances, under which the different routes to attitude
formation and change are likely to occur. Understanding the impact of involvement and motivation and how consumers engage with it.
APE Model: associative propositional evaluation
Assumes that attitudes can be rooted in two types of mental processes, implicit and explicit:
1) Associative evaluation: basis of implicit attitudes (suggested). These are activated automatically after
stimulus; independent of truth values. Depending on the context, automatic evaluations are activated.
2) Propositional reasoning: basis of explicit attitudes. An associative positive evaluation can transform into
propositional. Truth values that are personal.
Transformation of associative evaluations into propositions:
May or may not be consciously endorsed. Explains how a change of implicit attitudes can contribute to change in explicit attitudes.
Example: positive association of pizza, lead to propositional reasoning: I like pizza.
, Though, can also go the other way around. You have truth values, but the associative evaluation is negative results in another attitude
change. E.g. alle studenten in Wageningen zijn trash, als je dus een nieuwe groep tegenkomt zie je die groep meteen als trash.
Mere exposure effect within APE: subliminal (onderbewuste) repeated exposure to stimuli from a given
category may effect associative evaluations outside of conscious awareness. This may form a new basis for
evaluative judgements. When you see some object more, you start to automatically like it more. This is one of the basic assumptions
of commercials: most marketing companies presume that the more you see a commercial or a brand, the more you automatically like it.
Evaluative conditioning:
An observed change in the liking of a stimulus that resulting from pairing this stimulus with another liked (or
disliked) stimulus.
Repeated pairing of an unconditioned stimulus (US), which naturally triggers response; with a neutral
conditioned stimulus (CS) results in more positive evaluations of the CS. If pleasant stimulus A appears on the screen,
then stimulus B appears too. The pleasant feeling emerges quite likely if B appears. Example dog with saliva: Unconditioned stimulus =
food, automatic response is salvation. During conditioning, the automatic response to something is combined with a whistle, noise. If we
combine that all the time, there’s an automatic response to the whistle. Depends if the stimulus is positive or negative after the response
took place. So first you didn’t have an opinion about it and it was a neutral stimulus.
How do mere exposure effect and evaluative conditioning relate to attitude change?
Onderbewuste/emotionele stimuli kunnen leiden tot een trigger (positief of negatief), waarbij je attitude over
een bepaald object kan veranderen door de positieve of negatieve gerelateerde stimuli.
Embodied cognition:
The idea that the body contributes to the acquisition change and use of attitudes.
People often express feelings and attitudes by metaphors based on concrete physical experiences (dark
hour/warm welkom). Mostly unconscious that you’re feeling ‘warmly welcomed’.
Embodied cognition can affect attitudes by subliminal stimuli which gives people a positive or negative body
effect due to e.g. warmth.
Persuasion: uni-model
Persuasion: the formation or change of attitudes through information processing in response to a message
about the attitude object.
The unimodel proposes that there is no theoretically relevant difference between information types. Any
persuasive evidence (source cue, message argument or feeling associated with attitude object) may vary on a continuum of
processing difficulty. Evidence (short) that is easier to process has a higher likelihood of influencing attitude
judgement at lower levels of processing effort; whereas difficult evidence (long) requires more effort to
influence attitudinal judgements.
ELM, HSM (Heuristic Systematic Model) and the unimodal share assumptions: all three assume the amount of
processing effort depends on an individual’s motivation and ability to process a message. In unimodel terms,
early information may increase the accessibility of certain inferences that then serve as a basis for interpreting
subsequent information.
How can the unimodel perspective provide a generalized understanding of persuasion as a sequential process.
he sequence in which information is presented would thus affect persuasion outcomes only in the case of
related information, and not in the case of unrelated information. Focus on what the effects of the
informational sequence are on the message receiver to understand two-sides persuasive messages. Example:
advertising a restaurant as 1) cozy atmosphere – pro and 2) small guest room – con; it led to more positive evaluations than a one-sided
message on only atmosphere. This is because a small guest room is related to cosy. Thus, the sequence in this matter enhanced the
argument.
Meta cognitions: people’s thoughts about their own thoughts or processes.
