ATTITUDES

Initial thoughts
Attitudes

and expression of identity

Identity function
Utilitarian function

Interdiscplinary
Behaviorism
Other fields

analysis

Classic debate: attitude neutrality (?)

Neutrality

vs. Ambivalence vs. No information

Measurement?
Societal value
Possible?

Why Neutrality is Difficult

#1 Automaticity

of attitudes

#2: mere exposure effect

Zajonc

(1968)

The Turkish word study

e.g., saricik, kadirga, ikitaf
0, 1, 2, 5, 10, or 25 exposures
pronounce aloud each time
Guess good vs. bad meaning

Moreland and Zajonc (1973)

Subliminal

Test

presentation (4 ms)

phase:

old vs. and new symbols

Recognition task: chance level
Liking: old symbols preferred

Additional information about mere exposure effect

The effects of repeated exposure depend on initial

appraisal of the stimulus

Initially liked, or neutral: increased liking, but:

Initially disliked: increased disliking

Classic Problems in Attitude

Measurement
Response alternatives not
appropriate
2. Acquiescence (yea-saying) biases
3. Framing
1.

Examples
Abortion
Pro-life

vs. pro-choice; fetus vs. unborn child, etc

Cloning
What

is your attitude toward research on animal

cloning?
If

research on animal cloning could be used to

advance our ability to prevent cancer, would you be in
favor of such research?

4. Social desirability effects (Goffman,

1959).
Social
desirability

true
attitude

Fundamental problem: how much of response is due to one

factor or other.

Classic (older) approaches

Vary

context in which responses are made

The Bogus Pipeline (Jones & Sigall, 1971)
Participants practice on machine, to convince that can

detect truth from lying

Then asked to express honest attitudes toward mix of
new attitudes, some mundane, some socially sensitive

Older approaches, continued

Disguise/mask

whats being asked

Symbolic attitudes

Underlying attitude A1
(socially unacceptable )

Overtly
expressed
attitude A2

examples of symbolic attitudes (Kinder,

1986)

____ students receive too much financial assistance from the

university (Boneicki, 1998)

Discrimination against Blacks is a thing of the past (McConahay,

1986)

Downtown St. Louis has too much crime

Potential advantages vs. disadvantages?

Tradeoff: efforts to disguise question threaten
construct validity

Newer approach: Implicit Attitudes

Attitude

object (prime) target

Presentation of prime assumed to facilitate or inhibit

response to the target

Semantic priming

chocolate food (semantic priming)

Evaluative priming
chocolate good (direct)
chocolate flower (indirect)
chocolate disgusting

Types of implicit priming tasks

Lexical decision tasks: decide whether target is a word or not

prime
chocolate
xxxxxxxx

target
good
good

decision
response
response

Word
or nonword?
RT
measured

Lexical decision tasks, continued

Construct

facilitation indices

RT (xxxxx good) RT (chocolate good)

(500 milliseconds) - (200 milliseconds) = 300 ms
300 ms represents implicit attitude index

Evaluative decision tasks

Very

similar to lexical decision, but

judgmental decision different

prime

target

chocolate

desirable

xxxxxx

desirable

decision
response
response

Is it a
good or
a bad
word?

some brief demonstrations

Summary
If

A and B are associated in memory, then presenting A should make B more accessible
of accessibility: faster to decide if B is

Consequences

a word (lexical decision)

positive or negative (evaluative decision)

Why implicit attitudes potentially

interesting
Potential

dissociation
Conscious vs. unconscious
Implicit attitudes less contaminated by
self-presentational bias (?)
Implicit attitudes purer measures of true
attitudes (???)

Strong argument:
separate systems view
Automatic
(unconscious)
system
Controlled
(conscious)
system

Implicit
tasks

Explicit
tasks

The critics speak

just

another attitude measure

predictive validity?
see Lambert, Payne, Shaffer, & Ramsey (2005)

assumptions

may be incorrect

strong correlations sometimes found

controllability of reactions to implicit tasks?

No

such thing as a process-pure measure

Larry Jacoby
No task 100% automatic
No task 100% controlled

More realistic view?

Automatic
system

Implicit

Controlled
system

Explicit

tasks

tasks

Subliminal Advertising?

Historical Background
The

James Vicary incident (late 1950s)

Popcorn sales increase by 50%, he says.

Media

reaction:

Minds have been broken and entered (The New Yorker,

9/21/57)
The most alarming and outrageous discovery since the
invention of the machine gun (The Nation, 10/5/57)

FCC

bans subliminal advertising

Peoples current views toward

subliminal vs. regular advertising:
Subliminal

ads feared more, believed to be

more effective (Wilson et al. 1998)
Subliminal self-help tapes
$50 million as of 1990

Evidence?
Vicarys

claims: fabricated!
No evidence that subliminal advertising
works in real-life contexts
Note: Regular advertising EXTREMELY
powerful, but people believe that they are
immune to it (Wilson & Brekke, 1994)

Subliminal influence
in laboratory settings
growing evidence

So why no evidence (yet) that

subliminal advertising works
outside of the laboratory?
Noisy contexts?

Temporal distance?
Fixed attitudes hard to change?
Maybe does exist, just harder to measure

Could subliminal priming be used

to enhance self-esteem?

I like myself, but I dont know why: Enhancing implicit self esteem by
subliminal evaluative conditioning (Dijksterhuis, 2004)
Modified lexical decision task
The word I presented for 17 milliseconds, followed by
50% trials: positive adjectives (e.g. Warm, sweet, nice, sincere, honest,

beautiful, cheerful, smart, strong, wise, healthy, funny, nice)

50% trials: non words

Control participants: positive adjectives replaced with neutral words

(e.g. table)
Results show enhanced self-esteem, immunity to failure feedback
Replicates across six experiments