Cognitive antecedents A person’s evaluation of an object depends on what he or she thinks about it.
It is the expectancy-value theory: The knowledge that the person has acquired in his relationship with the attitudinal object in the past provides him with a good estimate of how said object deserves to be evaluated (information about attitudinal objects is sometimes acquired through direct experience ).
Fishbein and Ajzen formulate their THEORY OF REASONED ACTION based on the theory of expectancy-value concepts. It consists of two fundamental parts:
- In the first it is postulated that the attitude towards an object is the result of the beliefs that the person maintains towards said object.
To verify this, they investigated the attitude towards the use of contraceptive pills:
- Initially, a list of beliefs about said use was obtained, which was subsequently reduced, leaving the more “normative” beliefs of the population.
To know what a person thinks about birth control pills, you need to collect two types of information:
- The degree of estimated probability of the belief or subjective probability (between – 3 and + 3). Example: If someone thinks that “taking pills is extremely unlikely to cause serious side effects,” the subjective probability of belief number 1 (“it produces serious side effects”), it will be -3.
- The degree to which the person believes that the consequences expressed by the belief are positive or negative or subjective desirability (between – 3 and + 3). Example: In the case of belief #1, most people will consider such consequences (serious side effects) to be very undesirable.
Relationship between subjective probability and subjective desirability:
- In the event that both are high (both + 3), said belief would contribute to the attitude being positive (product (+3) x (+3)).
- When one or both values are zero, it means that the person feels indecisive.
That belief does not constitute any attitude. According to Fishbein and Ajzen:
- Not all normative beliefs influence the determination of attitude in all cases.
- There is a set of salient beliefs for each person (between 7 and 10) that are truly operational.
The empirical proof that the attitude is the result of the beliefs that the person maintains in relation to the attitude object requires the prior completion of these steps:
- Determination of normative beliefs.
- Selection of those that are salient for each person.
- Calculation of the subjective probability and desirability of each salient belief.
- Calculation of probability x desirability products.
- Weighted algebraic sum of those products.
Not all attitudes arise in the way described and proposed by Fishbein and Ajzen (it would be equivalent to accepting that people have rational control of all their feelings and emotions). Stroebe, Lenkert and Jonas conducted research in Germany to demonstrate that Attitudes can be modified without appreciably altering their cognitive content..
Classical conditioning and instrumental conditioning Attitudes are conceived as results of prior learning, supposedly regulated by the same processes that are operative in all types of learning. A different question is why attitudes that are the product of conditioning have an affective antecedent. The answer is twofold: Social psychologists have been inspired primarily by conditioning theories that emphasize reinforcement. They have tended to assume that conditioning tends to occur automatically.
Latest research:
- Mental representations also take place in conditioning and deliberative cognitive processes intervene.
- Studies on Classical Conditioning: Staats, Staats and Crawford. His neutral stimuli were words from everyday language (“long”). As EI they used aversive stimuli (very loud noises).
After repeated association, the initially neutral words were evaluated by people on a 7-point scale. Three results of interest appeared in this study:
- The participants evaluated the initially neutral words more negatively than the control group. The words associated with the aversive E caused greater physiological activation than the control words.
- There was a close relationship between the intensity with which the words were evaluated and the intensity of psychogalvanic R.
Two subsequent investigations:
- Zanna, Kiesler and Pilkanis: The negative emotion generated by conditioning also extended to synonyms of the words used. The attitudinal effect had an effect even in cases where the context and the experimenter were different.
- Cacioppo, Marshall-Goodell, Tasinary and Petty: The effects of conditioning are stronger with nonsense words (“tasmer”) than with words from everyday language (before conditioning both were neutral). Studies on instrumental conditioning: The type of reinforcement used is usually “social” (verbal or paraverbal behaviors that indicate approval and are positive in nature). This reinforcement is made contingent upon the presentation of certain statements selected in advance by the experimenter.
- Result: It is possible to modify the emission of attitudinal statements. Insko experiment: An experimenter, while having a telephone conversation with a person, gradually modified his attitudinal statements. The process that mediates between reinforcement and modification of attitude has been the subject of strong debate in Social Psychology. Mere exposure effect The person ends up developing a positive attitude towards the object that has been presented to him on numerous occasions. Matlin experiment (Turkish words). Zajonc. used 3 different stimuli: Turkish words. Chinese characters. Photographs from a calendar that represented a man. Result: The frequency of exposure had a directly proportional relationship with the evaluation of the object in question. “Mere exposure” is a sufficient but not necessary condition for the intensification of the attitude to occur.
The mere exposure effect occurred even when the stimuli were not recognized by people: Doubts about the assumption that recognition of the stimulus is a precondition. Moreland and Zajonc:
Mere exposure can influence attitudes through: A cognitive or cold route. When there is recognition of the object. A hot, non-cognitive route. Recognition is absent and its place is taken by “subjective affect”. Bornstein.
He carried out a meta-analysis of 200 experiments and showed that the mere exposure effect is easily replicable, it occurs in a multitude of different contexts, with a wide variety of stimuli and with very different exposure frequencies.
This effect is accentuated in the absence of recognition, when its perception is subliminal. Recent research has shown that there is a wide range of cognitive and perceptual processes that can occur without the need for awareness on the part of the person. Kruglanski, Freund, and Bar-Tal: conducted studies to demonstrate the “affinity” of the “mere exposure” effect with other “stimulatory” effects that occur in the absence of consciousness.
When a person is presented with a certain stimulus in a mere exposure experiment, it evokes some hypotheses in relation to it. The subsequent repetition of the presentation of the stimulus to the person increases the person’s tendency to accept the initial hypothesis as a basis for evaluating the stimulus.
If this explanation is correct, an easily testable prediction can be made: Those factors that are known for certain to positively or negatively affect the use of hypotheses or plausible clues will also affect the mere exposure effect. Among these factors they choose two: Time pressure (performing a task in a limited time).
Evaluation apprehension (avoiding any errors in judgment). The authors’ prediction is that mere exposure effects should be increased by time pressure, while they should be attenuated by evaluation apprehension. In conclusion, it has been traditional in attitude research to consider the effect of mere exposure as an affective antecedent of attitudes.
Behavioral antecedents Behavior can also be a source of attitudes. The training techniques: A very intense repetition of certain behaviors will end up implanting them in the behavioral repertoire of the trainees without any resistance on their part. The most cited systematic empirical evidence for a long time was the so-called “brainwashing technique” (used by the Chinese on American prisoners of the Korean War with the goal of obtaining a commitment from the prisoner to the prison authorities). Although the impact of these techniques has been exaggerated, even Perloff (“brainwashing mythology”) does not deny their existence.
More recently, Fazio studies: Those attitudes that are formed on the basis of direct experience with the object of attitude, are learned better, are more stable and have a closer relationship with behavior than those that arise through indirect and mediated experience.
It is not so much the direct experience but the accessibility of attitude, what is really decisive, although direct experience is one of the determinants of accessibility. The theory of cognitive dissonance: Under certain conditions, carrying out certain behaviors produces important and permanent attitudinal changes.