Zusammenfassung der Ressource
Attitudes
- Mainstream Cognitive Social theories
- Allport
- Attitudes are learnt
- Eagly and Chaiken
- Attitudes are predispositions -
people have an attitude before
encountering a situation
- Study: La Piere -
attitudes towards
Chinese travellers
in America
- Only 1 instance from 252
prejudice was shown
towards Chinese couple
- Follow up survey - results showed
that 92% said they would not
accept Chinese guests
- Surveys - only discover social attitude, does not provide
answers to response if put in the situation. Naturalistic
research provides evidence of behaviours despite
attitudes given in survey
- Fishbein and
Ajzen
- Theory of Reasoned Action (TRA)
- Attitude: beliefs
weighted in order of
importance about
subject, eg.
breastfeeding provides
good bond between
mother and child
- Subjective norms:
what other people
may think about
the subject. eg. my
husband wants me
to breast-feed
- Behavioural intention:
attitude + subjective
norms will form
behavioural intention. eg.
woman will breastfeed
based on own attitude and
husbands opinion.
- Theory of Planned Behaviour (TPB)
- Study: Manstead -
attitudes towards
breast-feeding
- Adapts (TRA) to
include influences
of things outside a
persons control
- Behavioural
intention may be
affected by
perceived
behavioural
control. eg. a
woman may not
be able to
produce enough
milk to breast
feed, so planned
behaviour to
breastfeed may
have to change.
- Questionnaires and Likert-type
scales are used to measure attitudes
and then compared with behaviour to
see if the two are correlated
- Discursive Psychological approach
- Potter and Wetherell: criticise Marsh's study of
coloured immigrants and uses own interviews of
white, middle class New Zealanders
- Individual-social dualism
- Attitude research assumes a
person is not affected by social
context, even when filling in a
survey. A person may complete
the survey based on what they
think is socially acceptable
rather than using own attitudes.
- Attitude research claim that
attitudes are internal states that are
only affected by social processes
- Agency-structure dualism
- Attitude research claims that attitudes already
exist inside a persons head and use a
simple cause-effect explanation
between attitude and behaviour
- Individuals actively make sense of the world
but their choice of positions are constrained
by socially available positions
- Power
- Ignores that society is made up of
relationships between powerful and powerless
- Immigration and prejudice can only
be understood in terms of the
meaning of 'nation' and 'territory'
and accepted ideas of 'us' and 'them'
- 3 Methodological
issues of Marsh's study
- Loose definitions
and unbiased
terms - 'coloured
immigrants'
- Translated the
scale of sympathy to
hostility for analysis
- Assumed attitudes
were stable
regardless of
circumstances
- Potter and Wetherell interviews
- Used open-ended interviews to illustrate the
effects of context, variability and constitution
on attitude research
- Context
- Context can radically
change the interpretation
of a persons utterance
- Whole response should be
examined - attitudes can appear
different when in context rather
than first utterance. "I'm not anti
them..." can be followed by "but..."
which changes the response
- Normalise opinions by using
extreme case formulations. eg. as
everybody knows... or nobody in
their right mind would...
- Contrast structures. eg. if, but, then
- Disclaimers - to avoid criticism of
opinion they are about to give. eg. "I
don't mean to sound sexist but..."
- Different people have different meanings behind
the same question on a survey - doesn't represent
the same attitude/opinion when out of context
- Variability
- Discourse includes
contradictions - does not
represent a stable attitude as
claimed by mainstream theories
- May be due to contexts - attitude may change depending on the given situation
- Constitution
- Disagrees with
mainstream claim
that object of
thought and
attitude are two
separate things.
- A person creates their view of an
object whilst talking - the object
of thought does not exist
beforehand and is not a
measurable item
- McGuire: defined attitude as "the locating of an
object of thought” (the thing the attitude is
towards) “on a dimension of
judgement” (typically from unfavourable to
favourable)