Attitudes

Attitudes

1. 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

2. 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)