Attitudes &

Attributions
WEEK 4: ATTITUDES AND ATTRIBUTIONS
 Attitudes
•The organisation of our beliefs, feelings, and behaviour toward something
• More changeable and context-specific than values
•Attitudes are key concepts in experimental social psychology because they are
believed to operate at all levels of social influence
• Individual: Perception, thinking and behaviour
• Interpersonal: How we get to know/respond to each other
• Intergroup: Attitudes towards in-group/out-group at the core of cooperation
and conflict
 Affective, behavioural, cognitive (ABC)
components and motivational functions

Attitude Global, abstract principles

Attitude
that guide a person’s life
Values

Attitude
Attitude

Spiritual, moral, social,

Beliefs intellectual, economic,
political
Attitude
Attitude
 Attitudes are purposeful
•Object appraisal: Helps speed up processing and decision making
•Utilitarian or instrumental function: Maximise rewards, minimize costs
•Social identity/adjustment: Shared attitudes help people identify with each
other
•Ego-defence: Can enhance or damage self-esteem
•Value expression: Attitudes can help us express our values and communicate
them to others
 How are attitudes formed?
•Generally believed that attitudes are learned from other
people (accounted for by social learning theory)
•This can happen through three main processes:
• Classical conditioning
• Operant conditioning
• Observational learning
•Classical Conditioning: Attitudes are formed by learning
associations between things
• Advertisers will pair something that audiences already like
with something new with the goal of creating positive
attitudes about the new product
 How are attitudes formed?
•Instrumental Conditioning: Attitudes are formed by
receiving feedback from environment
•Social groups play a key role in instrumental conditional of
attitudes (Levitan & Visser, 2009)
• Students who develop more diverse networks show
greater change in attitudes during first two months of
university, and students are aware that different views
are rewarded/punished by different groups (E.g., can
express different views to different audiences)
 How are attitudes formed?
•Observational Learning: Acquiring attitudes from other
people (Bandura, 1997)
• Happens through social comparison (Festinger, 1954:
See Suis & Wheeler, 2012)
• Most likely to adapt our attitudes to align with the
reference group that we most closely identify with
(Terry & Hogg, 1996)
Attitudes can be explicit
or implicit…
Explicit
◦ In our conscious awareness and shape our decisions and
actions
◦ Easy to measure, and easy to fake: Subject to social
desirability bias
Implicit
◦ Sits below our conscious awareness, but can still influence
our behaviour
◦ Seen through bias in how we use language and behave
toward others
Measuring Explicit Attitudes
 Measuring Implicit Attitudes
•Implicit Association Test (Greenwald, McGhee & Schwarz, 1998)
• Assumes that we associate social attitude toward an object with
negative/positive descriptive words
• Test assesses implicit attitudes based on how quickly participants categorise
objects and descriptors
• There are a range of topics (e.g., race (black vs white), sexuality (gay vs straight),
weight (fat vs thin), age (old vs young))
• Criticized for assessing commonly known stereotypical connections between
social groups and attributes/adjectives that you may or may not actually
endorse, but are readily available due to their presence in everyday life
Attitudes & Behaviour
 Cognitive Dissonance
•Behaviour depends on many factors (e.g., Strength,
stability, and accessibility of attitudes; Shavitt & Fazio,
1991)
•As humans, we want to behave in a way that aligns with our
attitudes
•Cognitive Dissonance: Feeling caused by incongruence
between our attitudes and behaviour
• Discomfort is what often motivates us to change
behavioural patterns
 Dealing with Cognitive
Dissonance
1. Change attitude to align with the behaviour
2. Change behaviour to align with the attitude
3. Justify behaviour with new information
4. Trivialise the inconsistency by downplaying the
importance of the attitude or behaviour

Experimental social psychology is particularly

interested in attitude and behaviour change
 Changing Attitudes
•Persuasion: Using communication to change
attitudes (Hewstone & Stroebe, 2020; early
research conducted by Hovland, Janis & Kelley
(1953))
•Three components: The communicator, the
message, and the audience
 Important Factors
•The communicator matters (e.g., experts vs non-experts, in-group vs. out-group)
• Credible sources (Pornpitakpan, 2006) and physically attractive
communicators (Reinhard, Messner & Sporer, 2006) are judged as more
persuasive
•Messaging that is subtle about its persuasion is more successful (Wagner,
Howland & Mann, 2015)
• Fear inducing messages are least effective for attitudes relating to health
behaviours (Ruiter et al., 2014)
Cognitive Processes of Persuasion

Systematic Processing Heuristic Processing

Central route to persuasion Peripheral route to persuasion

through effortful consideration through less effortful mental
of the message shortcuts
Cognitive
Processes of
Persuasion
 Changing Behaviour
•Behaviour change is complex and relies on
attitudes and social norms
•Most frequently researched in public health
context (e.g., smoking cessation and exercise)
•Dozens of behaviour change theories (Davis,
Campbell, Hildon, Hobbs & Michie, 2015)
 Theory of Reasoned Action
(Fishbein & Ajzen, 1975)
•Suggests that behaviour is determined
by our intention, which is in turn
determined by our attitudes and
subjective norms
•Theory developed in the context of
health-related behaviour change
•However, attitudes are not always
accurate predictors of behaviour/
intentions
 Theory of Planned
Behaviour
(Ajzen & Fishbein, 1980; Ajzen, 1991)
•Modifies TRA by adding:
• Control beliefs: person’s perception
of factors that may influence whether
they can perform the behaviour, skills,
resources
• Perceived behavioural control:
perception of their “ability to perform
a behaviour”
 Criticisms of TRA and TPB (Manstead, 2011)
•Perceived behavioural control (TPB) may not be that important, particularly
when a person may have none/very little control (E.g., habitual behaviours that
we no longer actively choose to do, we just do it)
•Individual elements (E.g., normative beliefs and control beliefs) may interact
with one another and should not be treated as separate
•Overemphasis of cognitive elements (E.g., behavioural intention),
underemphasis of social/affective elements
Social Attributions
 Social Attribution
•Attribution: assigning a cause to our own and other
people’s behaviour
• People seek cause-effect relationships to make
sense of the world (physical and social)
• Heider’s theory of naïve psychology: People
construct causal theories of human behaviour
based on intuitive explanations and common
sense
 Heider’s First Princple
1. Our behaviour is felt as motivated rather than random: people look for causes
and explanations of others’ behaviour
2. People tend to look for stable and enduring properties of the world in order to
predict and control the environment
◦ Trait inference: tendency to attribute personality traits to people based on
little or no information
3. There are two types of social attributions:
◦ Internal (or dispositional): attributions based on personal factors (ability,
personality)
◦ External (or situational): attributions based on environmental factors
(situation, context)
 Theory of Correspondent Inference
•Correspondent inferences: Causal attributions made on the basis of underlying
dispositions (e.g., personality traits, ability)
•We use five cues to make correspondent inferences:
1. Choice
2. Non-common effects
3. Social desirability
4. Hedonic relevance
5. Personalisation
Making a Correspondent Inference
Cue Correspondent Inference
Choices The act was freely chosen

Non-common effects The act produced a non-common

(unexpected) effect The act reflects some ‘true’
Social desirability The act was not considered characteristic of the person
socially desirable (trait, motive, intention,
Hedonic relevance The act had a direct impact on us attitude, etc.)

Personalisation The act seemed intended to

affect us
Kelley’s Covariation Model

Sarah only smiles

sometimes in group
projects

Sarah always smiles in Sarah only Everyone else

group projects smiles in this smiles in the group
situation project

Sarah always smiles in Sarah smiles all No one else smiles

group projects the time in the group project
 Kelley’s Covariation Model
•Lack of ecological validity: people tend not to use this information in real life
•Evidence shows that people are actually very bad at assessing co-variation –
poor statisticians
•If people do attribute causality on the basis of covariance or correlation, then
they are indeed naïve scientists: covariation is not causation
 Attribution Bias
•Attributions can lead to errors and biases
•Instead of acting as naïve scientists or statisticians, people act as cognitive
misers
•Fundamental Attribution Error: tendency to overestimate the influence of
internal factors when explaining other people’s behaviour, even with strong
evidence for external causes
Actor-Observer Bias
•We are more likely to attribute our own behaviour to
external causes (e.g., the environment) rather than to
dispositional factors
•Possible explanations:
• Asymmetry of information (we have more
information about ourselves than about others)
• Perceptual focus
Perceptual Bias
As an observer, the focus of attention is on the other; as the actor, the focus is
on the situation
 Self-serving Bias
•Tendency to make internal (personal)
attributions for success and external
(situational) attributions for failures I’m funny, this is just
•This bias protects our self-esteem a bad audience.
•There are some exceptions:
• We make internal attributions for our
failure if it’s something we can control
or improve
• People with depression tend to do the I am such a good
opposite – personal attributions for comedian!
failure and situational attributions for
success
 Intergroup Attribution
•In intergroup relations, individuals make attributions of themselves as ‘group
members’ and others as either group members or outsiders
• Ingroup: social group to which a person identifies to be a member
• Outgroup: social group a person doesn’t identify with
•Intergroup attributions can be based on implicit biases (e.g., stereotypes)

•Ultimate attribution bias: negative

outgroup behaviour is attributed to
dispositional (internal) aspects, but
positive outgroup behaviour is
attributed to situational (external)
aspects
Lecture Sources
Davis, R., Campbell, R., Hildon, Z., Hobbs, L., & Michie, S. (2015). Theories of behaviour and behaviour change across the social and behavioural sciences: a scoping review.
Health psychology review, 9(3), 323-344.

Pornpitakpan, C. (2004). The persuasiveness of source credibility: A critical review of five decades' evidence. Journal of applied social psychology, 34(2), 243-281.

Greenwald, A. G., McGhee, D. E., & Schwartz, J. L. (1998). Measuring individual differences in implicit cognition: the implicit association test. Journal of personality and social
psychology, 74(6), 1464.

Hewstone, M., & Stroebe, W. (2020). Social psychology in our time: ‘From fun and games to grown-up science.’ Inside Psychology: a science over 50 years, 137.

Levitan, L. C., & Visser, P. S. (2009). Social network composition and attitude strength: Exploring the dynamics within newly formed social networks. Journal of experimental
social psychology, 45(5), 1057-1067.

Reinhard, M. A., Messner, M., & Sporer, S. L. (2006). Explicit persuasive intent and its impact on success at persuasion—The determining roles of attractiveness and
likeableness. Journal of Consumer Psychology, 16(3), 249-259.

Ruiter, R. A., Kessels, L. T., Peters, G. J. Y., & Kok, G. (2014). Sixty years of fear appeal research: Current state of the evidence. International journal of psychology, 49(2), 63-70.

Shavitt, S., & Fazio, R. H. (1991). Effects of attribute salience on the consistency between attitudes and behavior predictions. Personality and social psychology bulletin, 17(5),
507-516.

Suis, J., & Wheeler, L. (2012). Social comparison theory. Handbook of theories of social psychology, 1, 460-482.

Terry, D. J., & Hogg, M. A. (1996). Group norms and the attitude-behavior relationship: A role for group identification. Personality and social psychology bulletin, 22(8), 776-793.

Wagner, H. S., Howland, M., & Mann, T. (2015). Effects of subtle and explicit health messages on food choice. Health Psychology, 34(1), 79.