Attitudes & Emotions

LECTURE 4 (CHAP. 5)

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Overview
What is attitude?
Components of attitude & attitude formation
Quantitative approach & its criticism
Measurement of attitude
Employee opinion surveys
Two major theories of attitude change
Festingers cognitive dissonance
Heiders balance theory
Emotions & expectations

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 Introduction
Concept used by social psychologists to reflect
persons overall view about something. It is socially
learned and can be changed (e.g. persons attitude towards
politics, or religion).

Components of attitude
Cognitive
Information about something
Affective
Positive & negative emotions
Behavioral
Actual behaviour

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Attitude Formation
Direct experience
-e.g. playing basketball is fun
Social learning
-e.g. religion x is good
- May overlap with stereotype
Self-image
Person feels defined by their attitude
-e.g. I believe in democracy, I like jazz music, etc.
Defense mechanisms when attack on important attitude threatens the self
- e.g. defending self by defending your religion

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 Attitude formula
Attitude = sum of (belief) (evaluation for each
different attribute)

e.g. Calculation of attitude to cars (see text pg. 136-137)

A= (convenient 0.9)( Goodness 3) + (costly 0.6)
(badness -1) + dangerous + pollutants + etc. =

Criticism
Process of decomposition to attribute
e.g. what are the attributes of UW?
What are the attributes of a face?
Whole is different than the sum of the parts
e.g. course evaluation, chair

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6
 Attitude measurement
Similar problems to personality measurement
Example: see pg. 140
e.g. Here the only people who get promoted are those who
toe the line & dont make waves (agree, neutral, disagree)

Attitude measures are very poor predictors of

human behaviour.
Similar problems to personality
e.g. situation
Intention vs. behaviour
e.g. making a donation to UW
Similar to strong and weak situation in personality

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 Employee opinion surveys
What do we do with results?
Managements panic (e.g. Bells management)
Set up committee, find problems, then actions
Employee perception
Good opportunity to speak up
Raises expectations
Viewed as therapeutic
Perception of pressure to be positive
Connection to funding (e.g. Bell)
Perception of lack of anonymity

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 Two major theories of attitude change (consistency
theories)
Festingers Cognitive Dissonance
Dissonance is the result of two contradictory cognitions creating
tension, which motivates the person to reduce dissonance.
1. Changing one of the cognitions
e.g. stop smoking, or I am planning to quit.
2. Adjusting the importance
e.g. you cant trust these researchers
3. Adding additional justifications
e.g. it reduces stress which is the number one killer
Experiments on cognitive dissonance
Performing a routine task for $1 vs. $20
Attention to advertising
Group decision making

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 Heiders balance theory
Basic situation
Two people and an object represented as a triangle
Each link represented as either positive or negative
The system is balanced if the product of the signs
is positive (either all positives, or two negatives)
The system is in a state of imbalance if the product
of the signs is negative (either one negative, or three
negatives). The motivation to reduce tension by
achieving balance results in sign change towards
one of the links.
e.g. attitude toward a movie (see next slide)

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 Examples of Heiders Balance theory

Boss likes/dislikes something

+,-
+,-

A B
+,-

Application to marketing (e.g. Beyonc perfume)

Application to attitude change (e.g. LeBron James says drugs are bad)
Attitude change toward Bill Cosby
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Application of Balance theory to a group of 4

+
A C

+ (-) +
+ + (-)

B D
+

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Emotions
Definition
As feelings towards an specific event or situation
- e.g. seeing an old friend, being in a car accident
Physiological & cognitive component
Theories about which one comes first
- e.g. physiology of panic precedes the mental representation
Role of expectations
Expectations as probability of future events
- Low probability events leads to either surprise or shock
Formal & informal contracts at work
- e.g. Pay & hours of work vs. expectation about civility at work

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Wrap up
Attitudes have cognitive and emotional
properties. Their measurement does not predict
actual behaviour.
Quantifying attitudes is subject to criticisms.
Employee survey is therapeutic but may create
problems for management.
Two theories of attitude change (Festinger &
Heider) are based on required consistency.
Emotions & its relation to expectations

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