Attitudes, values and beliefs
Taken from Nicky Hayes ‘Foundations of Psychology’, 2nd Ed.
What is an
attitude? It may be worth beginning this section by looking at some of the
different ways that researchers have defined the term. In 1935, Allport defined
an attitude as: 'a mental and neural state of readiness, organised through
experience, exerting a directive or dynamic influence upon the individual's
response to all objects and situations with which it is related'. Other
researchers have defined attitudes in different ways. Rokeach (1948) defined it
as: 'a learned orientation or disposition ... which provides a tendency to
respond favourably or unfavourably to the object or situation'.
One difficulty with academic definitions is that they have to try to take account of all possible examples of the thing that they are defining. When we are dealing with terms and ideas which we use in everyday life, this can sometimes make them a bit obscure. Also, the theoretical view which we take of human nature will influence how we define what we are talking about. For example, researchers who took a more behavioural stance defined attitudes as 'predispositions to act in certain ways'. As with so many other areas of study in psychology, it is difficult to pin down exactly what we mean by the term 'attitude', although most researchers seem to work out what they are studying clearly enough!
Attitudes and values
Reich and
Adcock (1976) argue that it is important to distinguish very clearly between
attitudes and values. Although some
theorists have argued that they are really the same thing, we tend to regard
attitudes as broader, and at times less personal, than
values. An attitude is like a combination of beliefs and values together. But
it is as difficult to produce a clear definition of a value as it is of an
attitude: Rokeach (1973) defined a value as: 'an enduring belief that a
specific mode of conduct or end, state of existence is personally or socially
preferable to an opposite or converse mode of conduct or end state of
existence', which is probably as close as we are likely to get to an acceptable
definition.
There are a
number of things to notice about this definition. First, Rokeach described a
value as 'enduring' ‑ it is something that lasts for a long time. That's
important. Talking of the 'mode of conduct' is saying that a value may be
concerned with a particular way of behaving (for example, that it's important
to be unselfish or kind). Rokeach described this as an instrumental value. 'End‑state of existence' means that the
value is concerned with some type of goal (such as that of world peace).
Rokeach called this a terminal value. And
some values are very personal to us, while others are more socially important:
for example, someone might not be particularly concerned with whether they
dressed neatly or not, but they might take the trouble to do so because it is
socially valued.
Functions of values and attitudes
Rokeach
argued that values serve two important functions for us. The first is that they
serve as standards, which allow us
to weigh up our behaviour, and to decide what is praiseworthy or blameworthy as
appropriate. The second function is that they motivate our behaviour ‑ we try to live up to our values, and
to act in accordance with them if we possibly can. So values have a very direct
influence on our attitudes. Although they are more abstract, they act as
underlying standards and motives, which means that our
attitudes towards specific ideas or objects can often be seen to be related to
the values that we hold.
Katz (1960)
argued that attitudes serve four different functions: a knowledge function, in that attitudes can give meaning to our
experiences; an adjective, or
utilitarian, function, in that holding certain attitudes may make us more
socially acceptable and so help our social interaction; a value-expressive function, allowing us to express what we
experience as the more positive aspects of our own 'inner selves'; and an ego‑defensive function, which
allows us to defend and protect our unconscious motives and ideas (as in the
Freudian defence mechanisms). The implication of this is that some of our
attitudes will be very close to our inner selves, and we are likely to resist
changing them; whereas others will be much more 'optional' and amenable to
change.
In a similar
vein, Smith et al. (1956) argued that
there are three different functions which attitudes serve for us. The first of
these is object appraisal. Our
attitudes help us to assess different features of our environment, so that we
know how to act towards them. If you are a militant environmentalist, for
example, you would not be likely to be impressed by advertisements for new
cars, and so you probably wouldn't pay much attention to them. Attitudes allow
our past experience to guide our reactions, so that we don't have to go through
the process of learning how we should react each time. Because we develop a
positive attitude to things we have found beneficial in the past, or a negative
one towards things which we have found harmful, we know immediately whether we
should be approaching something, or avoiding it.
Another
function of an attitude is social
adjustment. Holding certain attitudes rather than others can help us to
identify with, or affiliate to, particular social groups. Holding the same
attitudes as other members of a particular social group is a way of stressing
how much you are like them, and therefore also of defining your own place in
society. In other words, holding particular attitudes can help the process of social identification.
Smith et al. identified a third function of
attitudes, which they called externalisation.
This is to do with how we match up our inner, unconscious motives with
what is going on around us. Attitudes, they argued, allow us to externalise our
inner fears or anxieties. For example, if we have an inner fear of becoming too
personally involved with someone, we might manifest that fear in a cynical
attitude towards close relationships in general. In other words, we treat
external objects as if they were relevant to an internal problem ‑
although Smith et al. emphasised that
this is an unconscious process, not a conscious one.
Smith et al. suggested that one reason why
attitudes are often quite difficult to change might be because any given attitude
can be serving any one of these functions, or even a
combination of two or three. As a general rule, they argued, we try to
understand the world better, and so we will change our attitudes as our
experience grows. But some attitudes will be resistant to change, because they
are serving a personal function for us.
This also
has implications for how we go about trying to change people's attitudes. It
implies that some attitudes will be more central ‑ serving more personal
functions for the individual ‑ than others, and the person will tend to
hold on to these attitudes strongly. So it will be more
effective to try to change peripheral attitudes at first rather than central
ones. It also implies that it is better to try to change attitudes just a
little bit at a time, so that the person doesn't have to cope with too much
disruption all at once, and doesn't become defensive about it. Defensiveness is
also likely to increase if the person is very tense or anxious, so another
implication of Smith et al.'s model is that people are more likely to change
their attitudes when they are feeling relaxed and secure, not when they are
feeling under threat or attacked.
Attitudes and behaviour
One of the
very earliest models of the human personality, dating back to the ancient
Greeks, involved the idea that the human psyche consisted of three basic
domains: the cognitive domain, which
is the thinking, reasoning part of the individual; the conative domain, which concerns the individual's will and
intentions; and the affective domain, which
is to do with feelings and emotions. One metaphor used to describe this was
that of a charioteer driving two horses: the forces which provided the power to
move the human spirit were the conative and affective domains, and the charioteer
guiding them along was the cognitive domain. It's an enjoyable metaphor,
although it doesn't fit very well with many of the theories of personality.
The idea of
cognitive, conative and affective domains of the human psyche has been kept
alive in attitude theory. Attitudes have been seen as having three dimensions:
a cognitive dimension, which includes the reasons and explanations which people
will give for why they hold a particular attitude; an affective dimension,
which includes the way they feel about their attitudes; and a behavioural, or
conative, dimension, which is to do with how likely we are to act on the
attitudes that we hold.
We can see
how these three dimensions would work together if we look at them in relation
to a particular attitude ‑ for example an attitude towards eating
caterpillars. The cognitive component in this attitude might be a belief that
to eat caterpillars is, say, unhealthy, or likely to do you harm, or at any
rate the sort of thing which would make you appear abnormal to others. The
affective component would be feelings of disgust
or nausea at the thought of
eating the things; and the conative component would be how likely you would be
actually to eat caterpillars if someone asked you to, or how likely you would
be to refuse to do it.
Inferring attitude dimensions
Rosenberg
and HovIand (1960) argued that the different dimensions of an attitude can be
inferred from different signals. For instance, the cognitive dimension of an
attitude is often signalled by what someone says. The affective dimension can
be assessed from people's verbal expressions of how they feel, or from their
physiological reactions to the attitude object, or from facial expressions,
posture or other forms of non-verbal communication (see Chapter 14). For
instance, our pupils tend to dilate when we look at something or someone that
we like, so measuring pupil dilation would give us an idea of whether someone
liked a given object. The behavioural dimension can be measured by observing
how people actually behave towards the particular object.
One of the
problems with the
There are
problems with these conclusions, of course. One of them is that we have no
knowledge of the attributions that
the hotel proprietors were making when they received the questionnaire. Since
anti-Chinese feeling was so common at that time, they may have believed that
expressing more liberal sentiments would lose them custom. Alternatively, they
may not have been prepared to engage in interpersonal confrontation when the
couple were actually on the doorstep, but preferred to dissuade Chinese people
from arriving in the first place, by stating in the questionnaire that they
were not welcome.
Specific versus general attitudes
Another
possibility is that the hotel and restaurant owners may have
been quite prepared to express
themselves as prejudiced against Chinese people in general, but found that they
quite liked, or at any rate had no objection to, the particular couple in
LaPierre's study. There have been several other studies which have shown such a
discrepancy between the attitudes that people hold and the way in which they
act.
Eiser (1979)
argued that this is an important weakness in studies of the attitude/behaviour
discrepancy. Typically, a study in this area assesses attitudes in general. But
then, it compares them with very specific forms of behaviour. The Chinese
couple in the study were middle‑class, well, dressed and accompanied by a
non‑Chinese American companion. This meant that they weren't likely to
have been typical of the stereotypical 'Chinese' that the hoteliers would have
thought of when answering the questionnaire.
In a meta‑analysis
of studies of attitudes and behaviour, Ajzen and Fishbein (1977) assessed 109
studies which showed differences between the attitudes which people expressed
and the behaviour which they actually showed. Ajzen and Fishbein showed that
fifty-four of these studies had assessed general attitudes and then attempted
(with a noticeable lack of success) to use these to predict specific actions
from research participants. This does, of course, still leave fifty‑five
studies which did seem to show a discrepancy between attitudes and behaviour,
but it suggests that perhaps the problem is not as clear‑cut as all that.
The question of intentionality
Fishbein
(1963) argued that it isn't attitudes as such which determine how people are
likely to act, but the intentions which
they help people to form. Behavioural intentions, Fishbein claimed, are arrived
at from a combination of three different factors, of which the person's
attitude towards performing the appropriate behaviour is only one. A second
factor which has to be taken into account is what the person believes other
people expect them to do in that particular situation. They may, for instance,
believe that it is more socially acceptable to act in a way that is different
from their attitude. And a third factor is how strongly motivated the person is
to comply with those norms: they might wish to appear 'daring' or
unconventional, for instance, or they might have very strong personal values
which mean that they do not feel able to avoid acting in a certain way.
For
instance, if someone didn't like cats, but, on visiting a neighbour, felt that
they were expected to stroke their neighbour's cat, and also felt that the
neighbour would be offended if they didn't, then they would probably stroke the
cat, albeit slightly reluctantly and probably not for very long. The attitude
alone wouldn't predict their behaviour, because it's a combination of all three
factors: not just stroking the cat, but also
acting socially acceptably and avoiding a confrontation.
This model
also allows for the idea that we might choose not to conform to the
expectations that other people have of us. So, for example, if the person just
described prided herself on being a nonconformist, or wanted to surprise her
neighbour by acting unpredictably, she might refuse to stroke the cat. The
negative attitude and the motivation not to comply with expectation together
would outweigh the social expectation. Someone who was very keen indeed on
refusing to conform to social expectations might end up avoiding or refusing to
do things that they really quite enjoyed!
The theory of reasoned action
Ajzen and
Fishbein (1980) developed the theory of reasoned action. This theory is based
on the assumption that people usually behave in a sensible manner, taking
account of information and considering the implications of their actions. As a
result of this, the theory argues that statements of intention are more
informative than attitudes in predicting whether or not people will act in
certain ways.
Ajzen et al. (1982) collected a set of
attitude measurements from a group of students about the smoking of marijuana.
They also asked the students to predict, on a seven‑point scale, how
likely it was that they would be smoking marijuana in the next couple of weeks.
Four weeks after the experiment, the students were contacted and asked if they
had smoked marijuana during that time. The students' attitudes correlated with
their actual behaviour with a score of .53, but their ratings of their intentions correlated at .72,
which was significantly larger. (There is an explanation of correlation
coefficients in most text books, but the principle is that, the closer the
number is to + 1 or ‑ 1, the stronger the relationship is between the two
variables.)
Sources of intentions
So where do
intentions come from? Intentions, in Ajzen and Fishbein's model, arise from a
combination of two basic factors. The first of these is the person's attitude
towards the behaviour ‑ as opposed to their attitude towards the object
or idea. The second is the person's perception of social pressure to perform or
not to perform the action. This is known as the subjective norm. In other words, in Ajzen and Fishbein's model, we
intend to perform a behaviour if we evaluate it
positively, and if we believe that it is socially a good thing that we should
perform it.
The
attitudes which we develop towards a behaviour arise
mainly from our own beliefs, based on past experiences, which link the
behaviour to a particular outcome. In other words, they are based on what we
think is likely to happen if we perform that behaviour. We can see that this
contains an assessment of probability ‑ our attitude towards going on a
diet will be affected by our estimate of how likely it is that going on that
particular diet will actually produce the weight‑loss outcome that we
want. Behavioural beliefs, then, are ways of expressing what the person expects
to happen.
Subjective
norms, on the other hand, are externally focused. They develop from the
person's beliefs about social judgements and how they operate in a particular
group of people. So they are all to do with what we believe the social norms
are in a particular group. Both behavioural beliefs and subjective norms
combine to form the intentions. So Ajzen and Fishbein's theory of reasoned
action is directly concerned with how our beliefs and our perception of social
norms influence our behaviour. They see intentions, rather than attitudes, as
being the central focus in this.
Heider's balance theory
Heider
(1944) believed that understanding people's cognitions, or ideas, about
relationships would provide the key to understanding social behaviour; and that
there is a strong tendency for people to prefer their attitudes to be
consistent with one another. If our attitudes are inconsistent, Heider argued,
a state of cognitive imbalance will occur, producing tension and a certain
level of stress. Unbalanced attitudes will leave us with unpleasant feelings of
tension, and so we will strive to balance them in some way. So, in general, we
seek a cognitive balance between our different attitudes. We find it much
easier to believe that people we don't like have unpleasant qualities, and to
like people who have the same kinds of ideas as we do.
Dyadic and triadic balances
Heider
applied this principle both to the understanding of personal relationships and
to the understanding of attitudes. A pleasant, tension-free relationship
between two people would involve a dyadic
balance: both members of the couple would, for instance, like each other
about equally. If the relationship was unbalanced, then tension and misunderstandings
would result.
In a similar
way, Heider's view of social attitudes was based on the concept of triadic balance: the three elements
being either three different people, or two people and an attitude object. So,
for example: if I like Sally, Sally likes Ann and I also like Ann, the
relationship is balanced, which is a pleasant, tension‑free situation.
Similarly, if I like Sally and both of us support the environmental movement
Greenpeace (the attitudinal object), then the relationship is balanced and
tension‑free. This model, of course, provides an explanation for the way
that we often seek out friends with similar interests and values.
But if I
like Sally but dislike Sally's best friend Josephine, then there is an
imbalance in the triad, which produces tension. Or if I like Sally but find
that she supports what I think of as repressive social measures against
unemployed people, then again there is tension and the relationship is
unbalanced. When all three of the relationships in the triad are negative, the
situation is more ambiguous. If I dislike Josephine, and also Sheila, and if
Sheila and Josephine dislike each other too, then it could work either way. We
might regard the triad as balanced ‑ there is no tension because we might
just have nothing to do with one another. But most researchers who use balance
models of attitudes regard such situations as unbalanced, because of the
tension that is generated by the negative relationships.
Heider
argued that the tension generated by unbalanced triads produces pressure to
change, so that we can get the cognitive balance back. But this assumes that we
see ourselves as directly involved in the situation. Mower‑White (1977)
asked research participants to rate a number of situations for pleasantness.
Each of the situations involved a triad of some type, but half of them referred
directly to the research participant (the person was referred to as 'you'),
while the other situations described other people. The research participants
rated balanced situations as 'pleasant' and unbalanced ones as 'unpleasant', as
balance theory predicted, but only when the situation referred to them personally.
If it concerned other people, they saw the situation as neutral.
Newcomb's theory of interpersonal balance
Newcomb
(1968) proposed a modification of Heider's original balance theory, which
concerned how suitable other people are as sources of information in the
triads. In this model, an imbalance will produce tension in a triad only if it
is highly relevant. If I believe that Sally is an authoritative source of
information on social affairs, or influential in deciding government policy,
then I may be disturbed by our lack of agreement regarding the treatment of the
unemployed. But if I perceive Sally as knowing very little about such things,
and having little influence, then her attitude is unlikely to trouble me very
much.
Using
Newcomb's model, some researchers (for example Zajonc and Burnstein, 1965)
found that we have a positivity bias towards
triads: we prefer positive attitudes to negative ones. We also find triads
which involve a positive relationship between a person and an attitude object
much easier to learn and to remember. This applies even when we are comparing
an unbalanced positive relationship with a balanced negative one ‑ the
positive one is easier to grasp. An unbalanced positive relationship might be
one in which, for instance, I approve of Greenpeace and like Janet (both
positive), but Janet disapproves of Greenpeace (negative). A balanced triad
with negative relationships might be, for instance, in the event of Sarah and I
both agreeing that we disapprove (negative) of blood sports.
Social judgement theories of attitudes
A different
group of theories sees attitudes as being forms of social judgements, much
like the physical judgements we make when estimating size, or how far down the
road something is. These theories originated with the work of Thurstone, in
1928, who argued that people could assess how favourable or unfavourable a
statement was towards its target object, without being particularly affected by
their own personal views. So, for instance, faced with a statement about the
Church and its relationship to